Unredacting Russiagate

Sundance at CTH: Sidney Powell Discusses Robert Mueller’s Team, Bruce Ohr and the Bigger FISA Picture….

Jonathan Swan, Lauren Meier, Axios: Trump expected to declassify Carter Page and Bruce Ohr documents

President Trump is expected to declassify, as early as this week, documents covering the U.S. government's surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the investigative activities of senior Justice Department lawyer Bruce Ohr, according to allies of the president.

The big picture: Republicans on the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees believe the declassification will permanently taint the Trump-Russia investigation by showing the investigation was illegitimate to begin with. Trump has been hammering the same theme for months.

• They allege that Bruce Ohr played an improper intermediary role between the Justice Department, British spy Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS — the opposition research firm that produced the Trump-Russia dossier, funded by Democrats. (Ohr's wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion GPS on Russia-related matters during the presidential election — a fact that Ohr did not disclose on federal forms.)
• And they further allege that the Obama administration improperly spied on Carter Page — all to take down Trump. . . .

The bottom line: President Trump has been hyping, and congressional Republicans have been calling for, the declassification of these documents. It's now put up or shut up time. We should find out very soon whether these documents are as explosive as advertised.

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker:  At long last, here come the declassified FISA warrants (and more)

No matter what the documents reveal, the media will pooh-pooh them as insignificant and will want to move along to fresh stories intended to make the POTUS look crazy, or dangerous, or corrupt, or boorish, or whatever new fantasy they can concoct to throw shade on his tremendous accomplishments in triggering an outright economic boom, a restructuring of trade arrangements to our advantage, and a foreign policy that leads from the front.

I always expected the declassification process to be completed before the midterms. Those who know what is in the documents have timed the process. Soon, we will know what they knew.

And from the golden years, Byron York remembers when a foreign adversary meddled in a presidential election.

The country doing the meddling, of course, was China, and the presidential candidate was Bill Clinton, who was already in the White House and seeking re-election in 1996.

Looking back on press accounts from the era, it’s striking how brazen a number of the players were as they went about the task of funneling illegal foreign donations to the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The names have been mostly forgotten now — Charlie Trie, John Huang, Johnny Chung — but the record remains.

Chung, for example, who was born in Taiwan and became a U.S. citizen, was a prolific Democratic fundraiser. Between 1994 and 1996, he gave $366,000 to the DNC and visited the Clinton White House more than 50 times.

In 1995, Chung gave a $50,000 check to First Lady Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff at an event on the White House grounds. His memorable explanation: “I see the White House is like a subway — you have to put in coins to open the gates.”

In May 1999, Chung testified before the House Government Oversight Committee. He said that in 1996, during the Clinton re-election campaign, he met with the head of Chinese military intelligence in the basement of a restaurant in Hong Kong. “We really like your president. We hope to see him re-elected,” the Chinese spy, Gen. Ji Shengde, told Chung, according to Chung’s testimony. Gen. Ji continued: “I will give you 300,000 U.S. dollars. You can give it to the president and the Democratic Party.”

That’s different because shut up.

Related: While Everyone Is Distracted By Russia, Chinese Spying And Influence Runs Wild.