FISA Docs: Court Was Misled, Nunes Committee Was Right By Sara Carter
Source:
https://saraacarter.com/fisa-docs-court-was-misled-nunes-committee-was-right/
Jul 23, 2018
The release of the highly redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) documents on Carter Page, a former short-term, volunteer advisor with the Trump campaign, confirms that the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice and FBI misled the secret court with unsubstantiated erroneous evidence.
The FISA documents appear to confirm that the Russia report investigations conducted by the House Intelligence Committee and its chairman, Devin Nunes (R-CA) are true and that Page’s constitutional rights were apparently violated when members of the intelligence and law enforcement community weaponized the tools of their trade by allowing surveillance of Americans for political reasons, said a former senior intelligence official.
“This may now have set a new world record in the ‘reckless disregard for the truth’ category…”
The official said that the American people and the nation’s intelligence apparatus were “lied to by corrupted officials bent on removing or stopping a duly elected candidate from taking office.” Due to how close the corrupt officials were to stopping Trump from getting elected, the source said, “This is something that should shake all of us to our core.”
Page told SaraACarter.com, “This may now have set a new world record in the ‘reckless disregard for the truth’ category.” He noted that his life has been turned upside down by the false accusations and said, “even more shocking than the civil rights abuses inherent in today’s FISA abuse documents and its testament to (Former FBI Director James) Comey and Co’s very poor legal judgement, is the complete ignorance it shows regarding Russia.”
More concerning is that the documents expose Comey’s apparent false statements that he gave in an interview with Fox New’s Brett Baier when he insisted on April 26, that the “dossier” was not a “critical part of it (the application).”
“My recollection was it was part of a broader mosaic of facts that were laid before the FISA judge to obtain a FISA warrant,” Comey told Baier.
Comey stated that “there was a significant amount of additional material about Page,” but according to the FISA warrant, the bulk of that information came from the dossier and those connected to former British spy Christopher Steele. Steele was a significant source for the FBI despite the fact that he had lied to the FBI about speaking with journalists regarding the information he had collected; and despite the fact that Steele, himself, had not verified the facts that were given to him by former and current Russian intelligence officers.
“Since when do wiretap application rely heavily on speculative news reports?”
The FISA application also conveniently left out information that Page assisted the FBI in unveiling a Russian spy ring years earlier. The bureau never interviewed Page about his contacts with Russia when they obtained the FISA and more importantly, charges have never been brought on Page for being a spy for Russia. These are all questions that make the FISA application even more dubious.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, told CBS’s Face the Nation that the FISA application to wiretap Page was “garbage.” He said the entire process of obtaining the application needs to be reviewed.
“The warrant on Carter Page was supported mostly by a dossier that came from Steele, who is being paid by the Democratic Party to do opposition research and the dossier was collected, I think, from Russian intelligence services and if you ask the FBI today how much of the dossier on Trump has been verified,” Graham said. “Almost none of it.”
Judicial Watch, The New York Times, and with other news organizations had filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit roughly one year ago against the DOJ for the FISA documents. Page had no access to the documents and he contends, like many other lawmakers and investigators, that his character was assaulted and used as means to spy on the Trump campaign.
The FISA document states,“This application targets Carter Page…The F.B.I. believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government.” The document does not reveal that Steele was being paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign or the Democratic National Committee.
The document is highly redacted and many Republican lawmakers are still fighting to eliminate those redactions. Nunes, who has been at the center of the battle against DOJ since last year, said Sunday in a tweet that it is “time to eliminate the redactions” as he noted that his committee’s Russia report was vindicated by the release of the FISA.
Here’s what the House Intelligence Committee released on Sunday:
- Everything in the released material supports the House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) memo on these FISA applications.
The Democrats claimed the Steele dossier was not heavily relied upon in the FISA warrant. However, the unredacted material shows that the dossier, a politically funded opposition research hit piece paid for by the opposing campaign, was in fact used as an essential part of the FISA application and renewals.
- The Yahoo News article sourced to Christopher Steele himself was also cited extensively in the applications.
- The FBI falsely denied Steele was a source for the Yahoo News article – the author of the article, Michael Isikoff, has since confirmed publicly that Steele was a source.
- A crucial allegation against Carter Page, which justified the FISA warrant by establishing him as an agent of a foreign power, is that he met with two Kremlin-connected Russians, Igor Sechin, and Igor Divyekin. The only information in the warrant attesting to these meetings comes from the Steele dossier and the Yahoo News article sourced to Steele himself. Page has repeatedly denied meeting with these individuals, and no evidence exists showing these meetings took place.
- The footnote about the funding of the Steele dossier failed to disclose that it was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
- There are no indications in the FISA warrant that the FBI verified the information from the Steele dossier before presenting it to the FISA court. The FBI solely relied on Steele’s credibility from his former work with the FBI. However, Steele improperly leaked information from his dossier to the press and lied about those leaks to the FBI. This damaged his credibility. But, even after the FBI terminated him, they continued to cite to the FISA court his past work to show his credibility.
- As stated in our memo, Rosenstein signed the third FISA renewal (i.e. the fourth application).
- HPSCI supports further declassification of the applications because there are further FBI/DOJ misdeeds hidden under the redactions.
Gregg Jarrett, a legal analyst with Fox News and author of the newly released book The Russia Hoax, The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump, also noted several important disclosures in the FISA document:
- NO WARRANT WITHOUT DOSSIER: The application supports what Andrew McCabe told the House Intelligence Committee behind closed doors (there is a transcript of it, although it hasn’t been released publicly) that there would have been no FISA warrant without the “dossier”.
- FISA COURT DIDN’T KNOW DOSSIER WAS A POLITICAL DOCUMENT: Nowhere do we see that the “dossier” is described as a political document, as Democrats have persistently claimed; only that it was commissioned (by Glenn Simpson) to damage Trump. The judges were never advised that Clinton and Democrats paid for it. There are some cryptic references, but important facts were concealed and the court was misled. It was a fraud upon the court.
- FBI RELIED ON NEWS ACCOUNTS AND LIED TO JUDGES: Since when do wiretap application rely heavily on speculative news reports? Especially since those reports are derived from the same source as the author of the “dossier”. This is the now-infamous “circular sourcing/reporting”. The FBI & DOJ’s application makes it appear that the news reports are based on a second, independent source. In truth, it was the same source. Importantly, the FBI & DOJ represented to the judges in each of the applications that Isakoff’s Yahoo News story was an independent corroboration of Steele’s “dossier.” They knew this was untrue, yet they lied to the FISA court: “THE FBI DOES NOT BELIEVE THAT SOURCE # 1 (STEELE) DIRECTLY PROVIDED THIS INFORMATION TO THE IDENTIFIED NEWS ORGANIZATION THAT PUBLISHED THE SEPTEMBER 23rd NEWS ARTICLE.”
- STEELE LIED BUT WAS STILL “CREDIBLE”: Footnote on page 16 describes Steele as reliable and credible. Yet in subsequent warrant renewals, the FBI continued to describe the information he provided as credible, even though he’d been fired as an FBI source for lying.
Andrew C. McCarthy, a former prosecutor, and columnist for National Review Online, who has written extensively about the subject stated on Monday that based on the facts revealed in the FISA application, the bulk of evidence that the FBI relied on was on the unverified and flimsy dossier.
Devin Nunes Tells The Truth Until It Hurts By Mollie Hemingway
Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/04/devin-nunes-tells-the-truth-until-it-hurts/
January 4, 2021
In early December 2016, Devin Nunes was growing suspicious.
The political and media establishment, still struggling to cope with the news of Donald Trump’s victory, was beginning to claim that Russian cyber meddling explained the surprising outcome. On Dec. 9, 2016, big media outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post began laying out the contours of what would become the dominant and relentless media narrative of the next several years: Trump had conspired with Russia to steal the election and should not be viewed or treated as a legitimate president.
Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), was a long-time Russia hawk who had spent years concerned about the United States’ lack of preparedness for Russian cyberattacks. But something didn’t sit right about the how the media and other activists were arriving at the narrative.
For one thing, the claims were significantly at odds with the official reports from the intelligence agencies his committee oversaw. For another, the press reports were fed solely by dubiously selective and anonymous leaks from intelligence officials.
“I am deeply concerned that these press reports may contain unauthorized disclosures,” Nunes wrote on Dec. 12, 2016, to President Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, instructing him to have intelligence agencies send to Congress any new assessments that had been reported in the press. He expressed concern about the “manipulation of intelligence for political purposes” two days later. By December 16, having received none of the new assessments that anonymous leakers to the press claimed existed, he vowed to vigorously investigate intelligence agencies’ handling of the Russian meddling issue.
He had no idea at the time, but Nunes’s early skepticism of the “Russia collusion” plan to undermine the Trump administration put him in the crosshairs of all of the most powerful forces in Washington, including the media, the Democrat Party, left-wing special interest groups, intelligence agency officials, and even many Republicans.
Nunes’s dogged pursuit of the truth paid off, eventually, but it wasn’t easy. The “Russia collusion” narrative caused untold damage to the Trump administration and its policy goals. It sparked a years-long special counsel probe that pursued scores of Trump associates but found none who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Journalists won Pulitzers and other prizes for perpetuating the false narrative. Even now, many Democrats still cling to claims of Trump being controlled by Vladimir Putin.
However, Nunes overcame the media and Democrat hysteria, as well as stonewalling and obstruction by the FBI and Justice Department (DOJ), including threats to his own staff, to uncover the FBI’s use of an unverified dossier of outlandish allegations in the warrants to spy on Carter Page, a Trump campaign associate. He revealed rampant “unmasking” by Obama officials against Trump transition members, and the fact that FBI agents who interviewed Trump’s first National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn didn’t think he was lying.
He waged a court battle with the inventors of the dossier to find out that their work was secretly funded by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. And he revealed how that group employed Nellie Ohr, the wife of DOJ official Bruce Ohr, who was used to funnel questionable anti-Trump information to the FBI from his wife and her associates.
He also overcame the concerted efforts to destroy him and his reputation, remove him from committee leadership, prevent his re-election, and to get him to pull back from his work through threats against family members.
Later today he is expected to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.
Water, Water, Water
That Nunes would have the fortitude to take on the political and media establishments was not completely obvious when he was first elected to Congress in 2002. He was all of 29, representing a congressional district in the San Joaquin Valley in Central California, where he grew up. From a family of dairy farmers — a point that a critic on MSNBC would later use to dismiss him as ignorant — Nunes was known for his fierce advocacy of his constituents’ interest.
He set up his offices to quickly respond to constituent questions, reminding staff that they were the last line of hope for many of the California residents writing and calling them, and that they were to do what it took to solve their problems related to government services. One former staff member said that the “number one, two, three, four, and five” issues they worked on were “water.”
A lot of that effort was due to environmentalists imposing a catastrophic and artificial drought on many Central Valley farmers in the name of protecting a fish called the Delta Smelt. Nunes pushed that story relentlessly until he achieved national awareness of the plight of farmers, getting members to vote publicly on the matter, hosting rallies, and talking about the absurdity of the regulations destroying California farms.
Water policy in agricultural areas is always a hot-button and complicated topic. Hill aides say that many politicians like to complicate topics so people get lost in the intricacies. Nunes, they said, liked to simplify things so everyone could grasp the problem and solve it. He showed he was willing to buck party interests in his quest to serve constituents, calling on California’s Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to resign when he wasn’t allowing water to flow to the Central Valley.
Nunes, who also serves on the Ways and Means Committee, was appointed to the Intelligence Committee in 2011. He became chairman in 2015. The committee was an important, but relatively quiet, one. It investigated the Benghazi disaster, and worked to declassify some of the documents seized in the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound.
Once chairman, Nunes worked with ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff, also of California, to pass the annual funding authorization for the intelligence community. Nunes worked with leadership to recruit and retain a team of hard-working members who were interested in doing oversight and not just having a title.
As the Russia narrative spiraled out of control, Nunes continued to express skepticism. After Flynn’s phone calls with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak were leaked, Nunes told Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake, “There does appear to be a well orchestrated effort to attack Flynn and others in the administration,” he said. “From the leaking of phone calls between the president and foreign leaders to what appears to be high-level FISA Court information, to the leaking of American citizens being denied security clearances, it looks like a pattern.”
The Mask Drops
Russia hoaxers had managed to get Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from any oversight of the probe. They continued to leak like sieves against the president. Anonymous intelligence officials falsely claimed to credulous reporters that the ludicrous “dossier” was being verified, although details and substantiation were always just around the corner.
In March 2017, Nunes revealed that in the last three months of the Obama presidency, significant personal information from and about the Trump transition was collected and widely disseminated at intelligence agencies. While he said the collection of information may have been legally collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), he was “alarmed” by it. In a free country, where watchdogs care about threats to privacy from government surveillance, this would have been a massive story.
Instead of covering the news, the political and media establishment worked to kill the story. Rather than focus in any way on the spying, they claimed to be upset that Nunes didn’t first brief his leaky and highly partisan colleague Schiff before holding a press conference. As for the substance of the claims, the media worked to avoid covering it in any detail.
PBS’ Judy Woodruff asked Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice a gentle, very general question about Nunes’s claims:
JUDY WOODRUFF: I began by asking about the allegations leveled today by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes that Trump transition officials, including the president, may have been swept up in surveillance of foreigners at the end of the Obama administration.
SUSAN RICE: I know nothing about this. I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.
It turns out that Rice was completely lying on national television. After word got out that Rice had, in fact, been one of the people to “unmask” transition officials who had been swept up in surveillance, she went to the Democratic journalist Andrea Mitchell for a damage control interview. Rice, who has a reputation for dishonesty, told Mitchell that her unmaskings weren’t “political” and added, somewhat confusingly, “I leaked nothing to nobody.”
It is interesting, though, that the meeting she unmasked — between Trump officials and the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates — did happen to leak to the Washington Post.
It wasn’t just Rice. Samantha Power unmasked nearly 300 Americans in 2016, despite U.S. ambassadors having little if any legitimate justification for unmasking. She claimed that the unmaskings done in her name were actually done by other, unknown people.
And a whopping 39 Obama officials unmasked Flynn, a frequent victim of leaked communications. Among the unmaskers were officials with little legitimate need to access this kind of intelligence. They include former Vice President Joe Biden, Power, and Obama’s Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough.
The media response to the entire Russia collusion hoax was so manic and horrifically corrupt that it marked a turning point in Nunes’s engagement with them. He began to see that many members of the media weren’t journalists, but liars, and treated them accordingly. He instructed staff to stop responding to dishonest reporters who had pre-written their stories before contacting him.
Many members of Congress are scared of the media and other powerful interests. If they get attacked by them, they back down. Staff say that’s where Nunes is different. If he gets punched by someone, he wonders why and starts looking for answers. The more that he was attacked, the more he wanted to understand what was behind the Russia collusion narrative.
His opponents couldn’t have been more wrong in how to contain him.
FISA Abuse Memo
The media frenzy and coordinated opposition to Nunes led to claims that he had to recuse himself from leading the investigation into Russian collusion. Three left-wing groups filed an ethics complaint that Nunes’s mentioning of the unmasking constituted mishandling classified information. The claim was picked up by the Ethics Committee. While they eventually dismissed the complaint, they publicly announced the investigation and took the better part of the year to investigate it.
Nunes did recuse himself from leading the probe into Russian meddling, instead focusing on abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process during the surveillance of Trump campaign affiliates. The task was made significantly difficult by the DOJ’s general refusal to comply or comply fully with information requests on the surveillance.
The memo broke the news that the “Steele dossier” formed an essential part of the application to spy on Trump affiliate Carter Page, and that the warrant failed to note that Clinton and the DNC funded the dossier. It showed that Steele should have been fired as a source for blabbing to the press before he was eventually fired for the same reason.
It showed that information from Steele continued to be funneled to the FBI through a DOJ official married to someone else working on the larger dossier project, and that the negative information he provided the FBI about Steele’s lack of credibility was kept away from the FISA Court. Ohr, the DOJ official, also funneled to the Bureau his wife’s work for opposition research firm Fusion GPS.
All of these relationships were kept concealed from the FISA Court. Nunes’s memo revealed that the dossier had not been even close to verified when it was used in the application.
All of these things are now common knowledge and have been reported via other means, such as the DOJ’s inspector general, declassification of underlying documents, and a few media investigations. But at the time they were published, they seriously undercut the Russia collusion narrative and provoked strenuous denunciation of Nunes.
The Department of Justice said that release of memo would be “extraordinarily reckless,” would be “damaging” to “national security,” and would risk “damage to our intelligence community or the important work it does in safeguarding the American people.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said it was a “gift to Putin.”
When the report was released, the media made a variety of contradictory claims, all of them downplaying or dismissing the memo as nothing whatsoever. “Why Were The Democrats So Worried About The Nunes Memo?” asked The New Yorker. Rachel Maddow said that, far from destroying national security, instead the memo delivered “a sad trombone for Trump.” “It’s a joke and a sham,” claimed Washington Post writers.
“The memo purports to show that the process by which the FBI and Justice Department obtained approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to conduct surveillance on former Trump adviser Carter Page was deeply tainted,” the Post article says. “It does this by straining every which way to suggest that the basis for the warrant was the so-called ‘Steele dossier,’ which contains Democratic-funded research by former British spy Christopher Steele.” (The inspector general later confirmed that efforts to secure a warrant to spy on Page were dropped due to lack of evidence until Steele delivered his dossier memos.)
On the other hand, Salon called the memo “fake news.” New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who fervently believes that Trump is a traitor who colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, all evidence to the contrary, went even further. “The Nunes Memo Is Fake and the Russia Scandal Is Very Real,” he claimed. “While the evidence that the DOJ has been corrupt or even sloppy in its investigation has disintegrated, evidence for the seriousness of the investigation itself has grown progressively stronger,” Chait claimed.
CNN had their good buddy James Clapper, a famously untruthful Obama intelligence chief, on to say that the memo was a “blatant political act.” John Brennan, Obama’s mendacious CIA chief who was also implicated in the spying on the Trump campaign, told Politico that the memo was “exceptionally partisan.” Politico claimed the memo “makes no sense.”
“Nunes Memo Accidentally Confirms the Legitimacy of the FBI’s Investigation,” asserted The Intercept. “All Smoke, No Fire,” claimed resistance member Orin Kerr in The New York Times. “The Nunes Memo Continues To Backfire,” declared the hyperpartisan Washington Post editorial board.
Schiff issued a response memo in which he claimed that everything was above reproach in the FISA process. “Nail in the Coffin for Nunes Memo,” declared the headline of a U.S. News and World Report article that effusively praised Schiff.
“Nunes’ memo was a bad joke from the start,” the author wrote, going on to assert that Page was a dangerous agent of Russia, multiple Trump campaign operatives were surveilled for excellent reason, and the ex-British spy secretly Clinton hired to produce the dossier alleging Trump was a secret agent of Russia was simply beyond reproach.
An inspector general report later vindicated Nunes’s memo and discredited each of the claims in Schiff’s memo. Schiff claimed he was “unaware” of the problems the IG found and continues to defend the FBI investigation even now. He has not held a single hearing on the IG report, nor on the conviction of FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith for doctoring evidence for use in a Page spy warrant.
Few Friends
The daily onslaught of Russia collusion stories made life difficult for anyone who stood against the tide. The media were in a constant state of hysteria. Nunes stood mostly alone in insisting there was no evidence Trump had colluded with Russia, but there were strong indications the FBI’s investigation of the issue had been corrupted. It wasn’t just Democrats, media operatives, and leftwing groups who were attacking him but even fellow Republicans.
Sen. Lindsay Graham frequently appeared on television in the last year to complain about the Russia collusion hoax. He even held a couple of hearings in the fall of 2020 — long after it mattered. But back in 2017, Graham went on NBC News to mock Nunes, saying he was running “an Inspector Clouseau investigation.” Republican Rep. Walter Jones called on Nunes to resign from the committee leadership.
National Review’s David French called on Nunes to resign his post, and went on left-wing MSNBC to promote his view that Nunes lacked “integrity, character, and — crucially — competence,” saying it was “time” for Nunes to go. French claimed that Trump voters in his area of Tennessee were extremely worried about Trump’s ties to Russia and would need someone with better traits to dig into the matter.
It was a vicious claim against a member known as a straight shooter. The attacks were difficult for Nunes and his staff. For decades, he had taught his staff that they should always be honest when dealing with constituents, that they should “tell the truth until it hurts.” Constituents may not like the congressman’s position, but they would know what his true position was. “As far as Devin as a politician, ‘straight shooter’ is a little on the nose,” said one former top aide.
MSNBC’s John Heilemann repeatedly suggested Nunes was “compromised by the Russians:”
‘[Nunes is] behaving like someone who’s been compromised, and there are people in the intelligence community, and others with great expertise in this area, who look at him and say, ‘That guy’s been compromised,” Heilemann told [Senator Chris] Murphy.
Heilemann did not note that Nunes has a lengthy reputation as a Russia hawk, having warned that Russian activity was the country’s “biggest intelligence failure since 9/11” and having stridently advocated for a stronger U.S. approach to Putin.
Shep Smith called Nunes’s memo a “weapon of partisan mass distraction, especially at a pivotal moment in American democracy when it behooves the man in charge for supporters to believe the institutions can’t be trusted, the investigators are corrupt and the news media are liars. Context matters.”
As Nunes’s influence grew, he was subject to constant media attacks, including tendentious “profiles” that were error-filled hit pieces. Reporters went after his family. Nunes’ wife received threats after a Democratic operative files a public records request against her to get her work emails (she’s a public school teacher), then published them on the Internet. Then leftwing group Campaign for Accountability cited the emails in an ethics complaint against Devin.
Esquire’s Ryan Lizza published a lengthy story alleging that Nunes had a “politically explosive secret,” that he’s a hypocrite on immigration policy, and that when Lizza went to a small town in Iowa to blow open the conspiracy, he was met by odd townspeople who treated him poorly. It turned out that Nunes didn’t have a secret, that he was not a hypocrite on immigration policy, and that the Iowans Lizza met were wary of him slowly driving around town while children were at play because they discovered Lizza had recently been fired from his job for sexual misconduct.
A Top Political Target for Years
Nunes became a top target of the Democrats, left-wing groups, and the media because they could see early on he’d be a problem for their Russia collusion narrative. His seat even became a top Democratic target in 2018. Nunes had enjoyed comfortable leads in his previous re-election campaigns, even if he treated each race as a serious contest. In 2016, he won with 68 percent of the vote.
In 2018, his opponent was a relative unknown, a prosecutor with no political background who had moved into the district. Thanks to a massive, coordinated nationwide effort from leftwing groups, Andrew Janz raised more than $9 million and gave Nunes the closest race he’d had in a long while. The race earned national attention from the media and other activist groups.
Leftist groups astroturfed regular protests filled with angry people from outside the district posing as constituents at Nunes’s field offices. They overwhelmed his robust constituent service operation with angry calls from across the country. Much of it was Russia focused.
At one point, Janz had an actor pose as a Russian official to give Nunes a “key to Moscow.” Fusion GPS, the group that had been behind the Steele dossier, even admitted that Nunes was the only member of Congress on whom they ran an oppo hit during the 2018 campaign. They gave their information to a McClatchy newspaper and tried, but failed, to link Nunes to a dramatic story involving a separate group of people having a cocaine-fueled fundraiser on a yacht owned by a winery he was loosely associated with.
Targeted in D.C. by media mobs and in his home district by a major coordinated effort to oust him, he kept going. At a time when anybody in D.C. who fought the Russia collusion hoax was hammered and attacked, Nunes went out and pushed for the truth. He did it willingly and refused to quit. He also refused to give in to his many attackers, despite their relentless barrage.
When the White House leaked to the Washington Post about their plans to award Nunes and Rep. Jim Jordan the presidential medal of freedom, the media and political figures who pushed the Russia collusion hoax continued their attacks on him, the same attacks they’d been making for years in an attempt to keep him from uncovering abuses of the intelligence agencies he oversees.
It is unlikely their latest efforts will work any better than their earlier ones.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. Follow her on Twitter at @mzhemingway
President Donald J. Trump to Award the Medal of Freedom to Devin Nunes
Source:
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-award-medal-freedom-devin-nunes/
Issued on: January 4, 2021
On Monday, President Donald J. Trump will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Devin Nunes. This prestigious award is the Nation’s highest civilian honor, which is awarded by the President to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.
Devin grew up on a farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Since his election to Congress in 2002 at the age of 29, he has been a tireless fighter for the farmers of California, waging a long and successful battle to bring water to the Central Valley. In 2014, Devin was selected to chair the House Intelligence Committee. As Chairman, he confronted Russian aggression and opposed the Iran Nuclear Deal. Against fierce opposition, he led the effort to declassify documents seized in the bin Laden raid that showed Al Qaeda’s collaboration with Iran.
In 2017, Congressman Nunes launched an investigation into the Obama-Biden administration’s misconduct during the 2016 election – and began to unearth the crime of the century. As a result of his work, he discovered that the infamous Steele Dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. He found that a senior Justice Department attorney was married to one of the architects of the document. He learned that the Obama-Biden administration had issued Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to spy on President Trump’s campaign and illegitimately unmasked several innocent spying victims for political gain.
Devin Nunes’ courageous actions helped thwart a plot to take down a sitting United States president. Devin’s efforts led to the firing, demotion, or resignation of over a dozen FBI and DOJ employees. He also forced the disclosure of documents that proved that a corrupt senior FBI official pursued a vindictive persecution of General Michael Flynn — even after rank and file FBI agents found no evidence of wrongdoing.
Congressman Nunes pursued the Russia Hoax at great personal risk and never stopped standing up for the truth. He had the fortitude to take on the media, the FBI, the Intelligence Community, the Democrat Party, foreign spies, and the full power of the Deep State. Devin paid a price for his courage. The media smeared him and liberal activists opened a frivolous and unjustified ethics investigation, dragging his name through the mud for eight long months. Two dozen members of his family received threatening phone calls – including his 98 year old grandmother.
Congressman Devin Nunes is a public servant of unmatched talent, unassailable integrity, and unwavering resolve. He uncovered the greatest scandal in American history.
Devin Nunes Official U.S. House Website
Source:
https://nunes.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=398858
Source:
https://nunes.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=398857
FISA Abuse Investigation - United States Senate Committee of the Judiciary
Source:
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/fisa-investigation
January 15, 2021
Chairman Graham released 11 transcripts of interviews conducted during the Senate Judiciary Committee's inquiry into the origins and aftermath of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation. (press release)
Handling Agent 1: Interviewed on Tuesday, March 3, 2020 (Transcript)
Michael B. Steinbach: Interviewed on Friday, June 12, 2020 (Transcript)
Stephen C. Laycock: Interviewed on Monday, June 15, 2020 (Transcript)
Dana J. Boente: Interviewed on Monday, June 22, 2020 (Transcript)
Bruce Ohr: Interviewed on Tuesday, June 30, 2020 (Transcript)
Stuart Evans: Interviewed on Friday, July 31, 2020 (Transcript)
Supervisory Special Agent 1: Thursday, August 27, 2020 (Transcript)
Jonathan Moffa: Interviewed on Wednesday, September 9, 2020 (Transcript)
Deputy Chief, Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, Justice Department: Interviewed on Friday, September 18, 2020 (Transcript)
Case Agent 1: Interviewed on Friday, September 25, 2020 (Transcript)
Supervisory Intelligence Analyst: Interviewed on Thursday, October 29, 2020 (Transcript)
September 29, 2020
Chairman Graham released a letter from Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe. DNI Ratcliffe responded to Graham’s request for intelligence community information regarding the FBI’s handling of Crossfire Hurricane. (document) (press release)
September 24, 2020
Chairman Lindsey Graham released a letter from Attorney General William Barr and a declassified summary from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that indicate Christopher Steele’s Primary Sub-source was a likely Russian agent and had previously been the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation. (document) (press release)
August 23, 2020
Chairman Graham released newly declassified FBI documents and communications demonstrating the Bureau’s double standard when it came to the Clinton and Trump campaigns. (document) (press release)
August 9, 2020
Chairman Graham released a newly declassified FBI document that indicates the Bureau misled the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2018 about the Steele dossier’s Primary Sub-source and therefore, the reliability of the Steele dossier. (document) (press release)
July 17, 2020
Chairman Graham secured the release of two recently declassified documents that significantly undercut the reliability of the Steele dossier and the accuracy and reliability of many of the factual assertions in the Carter Page FISA applications. (document 1) (document 2) (press release)
June 11, 2020
The Committee authorized Chairman Graham to issue subpoenas related to oversight of the FISA process and the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. (press release)
June 3, 2020
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled, “Oversight of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation: Day 1” with former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as a witness. (hearing)
May 27, 2020
Chairman Graham announced that former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would testify before the committee at a hearing titled, “Oversight of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation: Day 1.” (press release)
May 19, 2020
Chairman Graham sent a letter to Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell and Attorney General William Barr to ask that the Committee be provided with the names of any official who made a request to unmask the identity of individuals associated with the Trump campaign or transition team. (press release)
May 18, 2020
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) today announced that the Committee would debate and vote on a subpoena authorization related to the FISA abuse investigation and oversight of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. (press release)
May 6, 2020
The Senate Judiciary Committee released a memo from Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to Special Counsel Robert Mueller regarding "The Scope of Investigation and Definition of Authority". (memo)
May 6, 2020
The Senate Judiciary Committee released an additional declassified transcript between George Papadopoulos and an FBI confidential human source (declassified on May 5, 2020). (document)
April 27, 2020
The Senate Judiciary Committee released an additional declassified transcript between George Papadopoulos and an FBI confidential human source (declassified on April 24, 2020). (document)
April 27, 2020
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) wrote to Attorney General William Barr asking the Department of Justice (DOJ) to produce a number of documents related to information from Christopher Steele’s primary source who ultimately contradicted Steele’s reporting. (press release, letter)
April 16, 2020
The Senate Judiciary Committee released three categories of material:
- Declassified DOJ materials related to the Crossfire Hurricane operation.
- Timeline of correspondence sent or received by Chairman Graham and Committee activity regarding the FISA abuse investigation.
- Corrective actions taken by DOJ and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as a result of the FISA abuse investigation.
As part of Chairman Graham’s efforts to increase transparency and accountability to the American people, these declassified documents and other material may be accessed below.
Memorandum on Declassification of Certain Materials Related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation
Source:
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-declassification-certain-materials-related-fbis-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/
Issued on: January 19, 2021
MEMORANDUM FOR THE ATTORNEY GENERAL
THE DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
THE DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
SUBJECT: Declassification of Certain Materials Related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby direct the following:
Section 1. Declassification and Release. At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public. I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.
I determined that the materials in that binder should be declassified to the maximum extent possible. In response, and as part of the iterative process of the declassification review, under a cover letter dated January 17, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation noted its continuing objection to any further declassification of the materials in the binder and also, on the basis of a review that included Intelligence Community equities, identified the passages that it believed it was most crucial to keep from public disclosure. I have determined to accept the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI in that January 17 submission.
I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.
My decision to declassify materials within the binder is subject to the limits identified above and does not extend to materials that must be protected from disclosure pursuant to orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and does not require the disclosure of certain personally identifiable information or any other materials that must be protected from disclosure under applicable law. Accordingly, at my direction, the Attorney General has conducted an appropriate review to ensure that materials provided in the binder may be disclosed by the White House in accordance with applicable law.
Sec. 2. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this memorandum shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This memorandum shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
(d) The Attorney General is authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register.
DONALD J. TRUMP
Declassified! The Russia informant transcript the FBI didn't want Americans to see By John Solomon
Source:
https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/declassified-russia-informant-transcript-fbi-didnt-want?utm_medium=social_media&utm_source=mail_social_icon&utm_campaign=social_icons
January 26, 2021
In secretly recorded talks with informer Stefan Halper, Carter Page dispelled key Russia collusion allegations before FISA warrant was even approved.
Four days before the FBI secured a surveillance warrant against him in fall 2016, Trump campaign adviser Carter Page repeatedly knocked down the key allegations at the heart of the Russia collusion investigation while talking to a government informant who was wearing a wire.
Page's unwitting statements of innocence to informer Stefan Halper were never shared with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before it approved four warrants authorizing a full year of surveillance of Page's communications.
Page's exculpatory statements were kept from the American people for four years until President Trump declassified them on his final day in office last week. They were obtained by Just the News.
"The core lie is that I met with these sanctioned Russian officials, several of which I never even met in my entire life, but they said that I met them in July," an FBI transcript quotes Page as telling Halper during an Oct. 17, 2016 interaction at Halper's farm in Northern Virginia.
At the time, Page was unaware Halper was informing for the FBI or recording him, and unwittingly believed his host was just a fellow academic interested in his research and campaign work.
You can read the transcript here:
HalperPageIntercept11-2016.pdf
The memos show Halper was repeatedly coached by the FBI on how to penetrate the Trump campaign foreign policy circle starting in August 2016 and how to quiz Page about several sensational allegations of collusion made by fellow FBI informant and former MI6 operative Christopher Steele in his now infamous dossier.
For instance, Halper prodded Page on whether he had played a role changing the Republican National Committee's platform in summer 2016 to make it more favorable to Russia, as Steele's dossier had alleged.
"I would have thought the platform committee would be a place where there would be an opportunity to clarify a relationship with the Russians or others, and you could have been very helpful," Halper said at one point.
Page — referred to in the transcript by his FBI code name "CD" or "Crossfire Dragon" — responded by claiming he stayed away from the platform changes, leaving it to other members of the Trump campaign team to handle.
"Well again, totally off the record, but I — members of our team were working on that and you know again in retrospect it's way better off that I, you know, remained at arms length," Page explained.
Similarly, Page steadfastly denied he knew anything about the Trump campaign working with WikiLeaks to release Hillary Clinton's hacked emails before the election, another key allegation in the now-debunked Russia collusion narrative.
"I guess what they're trying to do is work out the link between the Russians and WikiLeaks, what do we know about that?" Halper asked.
"You know I've made clear in a lot of, you know, subsequent discussions interviews that I've been part of … I know nothing about that on a personal level,” Page stated. "You know no one's ever said one word to me."
But perhaps most significant is Page's flat denial that he never met in July 2016 in Russia with two key sanctioned officials — oil executive Igor Sechin and Russian Federation official Igor Diveykin. Page's contact with the two men was alleged in both the Steele dossier and the FBI's FISA warrant application dated Oct. 21, 2016, just four days after Halper's interactions.
CarterPageFISA.pdf
Page acknowleged to Halper that he knew Sechin worked for Rosneft, but insisted he never met the Russian executive. He added he didn't even recognize Diveykin's name.
"There's another guy I had never even heard of, you know, he's like in the inner circle," Page is quoted in the transcript as telling Halper. "I can't even remember. It's just so outrageous."
Page stated during the conversation that his lawyers told him there was nothing illegal if he had met with the two men provided he didn't take anything from them, "even a pen." Halper prodded further, only to be shut down again by Page.
"So they're claiming you met with these two guys and you're saying it's perfectly legal to do," Halper asked.
Page answered: "Even if I had — which I didn't do by the way," Page answered.
It has been known since December 2019 that Halper recorded conversations with Page that were considered exculpatory and never turned over to the FISA court. The Justice Department inspector general concluded the failure to disclose the material to the judges was a major failure of the FBI's Russia probe.
DOJ IG report on Russia FISAs
But the exact details of Halper's conversations with Page have remained shrouded from public view until well after the Nov. 3, 2020 election, much to the consternation of conservatives and Republicans who wanted to make more of the Russia collusion false narrative during last year's election.
Contacted Monday night about the newly declassified transcripts, Page said he believed they exonerated him and that it was unfortunate that the memos were kept hidden for four years after the Steele dossier was leaked and impugned his name unfairly as a traitor.
"It is truly extraordinary that over four years since the worldwide release of the deadly dodgy dossier smear document in early January 2017 we still continued to learn more about the full extent of this historic disinformation campaign," he told Just the News. "Yet nonetheless, this latest declassification stands among the most shocking revelations yet."
The memo containing the partial transcript of the Halper-Page meeting was dated Nov. 16, 2017, but the inspector general's report makes clear the conversation actually took place on Oct. 17, 2016, or four days before the FISA warrant was approved by the FISC authorizing surveillance of Page on unspecified charges of Foreign Agent Registration Act violations involving Russia.
Kevin Brock, the retired FBI assistant director for intelligence who helped fashion the current rules governing the bureau's use of confidential human sources, said he could not understand how the bureau proceeded with a FISA warrant against Page after the spontaneous admission of innocence,
"There is certainly nothing in here that establishes probable cause for a FISA," Brock told Just the News. "And quite frankly there's really not even enough in here to keep the FARA case going."
"If I'm a supervisor on a counterintelligence squad, which I once was, I'd say close this sucker down, we are wasting time," Brock continued. "It's not just the absence of probable cause for a FISA, it's also that the conversation indicates the target does not have guilty knowledge in all the paths that the confidential source was trying to lead him down."
Brock added that at the very least the FBI had a legal obligation to disclose to the FISA judges the statements of innocence made by Page. "One hundred percent this conversation should have been disclosed to the FISA court," he said.
The newly declassified transcripts add to an overwhelming body of evidence that the FBI knew that Page was not a legitimate target for a Russia collusion probe and instead had been working for the CIA as an asset helping the U.S. to spy on Moscow.
Documents belatedly made public last year show the the CIA alerted the FBI in August 2016 that Page had been approved as an "operational contact" for the agency between 2008 and 2013. Later, an FBI lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith altered a document to hide Page's ties to the CIA from the FISA court.
Despite such evidence, only one former FBI official, Clinesmith, has been prosecuted for wrongdoing in the Russia probe, though special prosecutor John Durham has an active, ongoing criminal investigation.
Remarkably, the FBI documents declassified by Trump state the FBI planned to drop its interest in Page if Halper's undercover work did not get the Trump adviser to admit to collusion.
"If CD [Page] does not provide tangible information during the meeting of if CD explicitly states he does not know of any RF [Russian Federation] involvement in the campaign, the FBI will focus on a second target of the investigation," stated an Aug. 24, 2016 "operational plan" for Halper's interactions with Page.
You can read that memo here:
HalperOperationalPlanScenario2Memo.pdf
Page did not give the tangible evidence of collusion during the October meeting and denied campaign involvement with Russia, yet still the bureau proceeded to conduct an investigation that stretched for nearly three years before coming to the conclusion there never was any collusion.
