A Spate of Russiagate

I thought this was going to be a short one, but a spate of last minute finds has boosted the total. First, Chuck Ross at Da Caller reports how agent provocateur Stephan Halper used his Russian contacts to try to entrap Papadop:  FBI Informant Bragged About Links To Russian Spies In Secret Recording Of Trump Aide

“I have a lot of friends in Russia,” Halper told Papadopoulos during their conversation, which occurred over drinks, and which the FBI recorded.

“My point is that,” Halper said, “the Russians can be very helpful to us at this time and we’ve got some great information coming out.”

Halper, a former Cambridge professor, rattled off the names of the Russians, Vyacheslav Trubnikov, Leonid Shebarshin, and Yuri Traughtoff, according to a transcript of the secretly recorded conversation released on Thursday.

Halper was not bluffing about his friendship with at least one of the ex-Russian spies. He has collaborated with Trubnikov, the former head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR. Halper hosted Trubnikov at two intelligence seminars at Cambridge in 2012 and 2015, and interviewed the former Kremlin insider for a 2015 study on China-Russia relations he did for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA).

Halper’s goal in bringing up his Kremlin links was to get Papadopoulos to reveal whether he or the Trump campaign were working with the Russian government or involved the WikiLeaks release of Democrats’ emails, according to the Justice Department inspector general’s (IG) report on the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe.

Failing at that task, the Mueller team settled for interrogating him for hours, and using a discrepancy in dates to force him to plead guilty to lying to the FBI. Nice Deb at AmGreat reveals how Newly Declassified FISA Footnotes Expose Major Lies in Dems’ Rebuttal to GOP FISA Memo

As Twitter’s “Undercover Huber” pointed out, the declassification reveals that Section II, p.10 of the FISA warrant used language taken directly from the anti-Trump dossier: “[Carter] Page…has been identified by source reporting as an intermediary with Russian leadership” in “a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation” to influence the 2016 election.”

Because the FISA was heavily redacted in Feb. 2018, it was hard to debunk Schiff’s claim that the FBI only “narrowly” relied on the dossier for the FISAs warrants.
. . .
The Democrats’ rebuttal to the bombshell GOP FISA memo in February of 2018 has aged very poorly. In their memo, the Intel Democrats—who had access to the classified FISA information at the time—falsely claimed that officials at the FBI and Justice Department “did not abuse the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.”

The IG report, released in December by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, identified 17 separate errors and omissions with regard to all four FISA applications.

The Schiff rebuttal also falsely claimed that the DOJ only made “narrow use” of information from Steele’s sources, and that the FBI had an “independent basis” for investigating Page’s motivations.

More from Robyn Dolgin at AmThink, Adam Schiff’s Dirty Impeachment Tactics Coming to Light. You won't go far wrong in assuming anything out of Adam Schiff's mouth is a lie. A typically long missive from sundance at CTH, Understanding The Russian Disinformation Defense – As Predicted in 2018…

Rick Moran at PJ Media, It's Full Speed Ahead for GOP Congressional Probes into Origins of Russia Investigation. I'm not completely convinced. There are too many skeletons scattered around the landscape.

Sundance has Sunday Talks: Devin Nunes Discusses DC Political Games, Wuhan Virus and Spygate… Skip to about 5:50 for the "spygate" stuff:



From Issues and Insights, Hillary, Comey And Brennan Must Face Justice For Deep-State Spying On Trump

The FBI used the bogus evidence anyway to convince a FISA court to let the FBI spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Page resigned as a Trump adviser in September 2016. But by spying on him, the FBI opened a backdoor into Trump’s entire campaign.

Let the irony of that sink in. U.S. officials knowingly colluded with Russian intelligence using tainted evidence to prove that Trump colluded with the Russian government to weaken Clinton’s campaign.

If so, they were willingly duped by former KGB agent Vladimir Putin.

In addition, the footnotes show that these same senior officials “were aware of the disinformation when they included the dossier in the Obama administration’s Intelligence Communities Assessment.”

Under the legal “fruit of a poisonous tree” doctrine, evidence obtained illegally cannot be used as a predicate for legal action. That means the whole Trump investigation, including the tapping of Trump campaign officials’ communications, was illegitimate if not downright illegal.

The upshot of all this is that former FBI chief James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA top spy John Brennan and an array of their underlings knew the information that came from the Steele dossier was tainted, but used it anyway.

They did so again not for reasons of justice, but to prop up Clinton. In essence, the FBI, CIA and Clinton campaign formed a cozy little cabal using taxpayer money and federal investigative agencies to take down Trump’s campaign.

Moreover, it never ended. Even after Trump was elected, a ring of senior officials plotted ways to remove Trump from office. To us, it was little more than a silent coup attempt.

I don't think they were duped by Putin; I think they willingly used the Russian disinformation because it suited their goals.  Also from sundance, Brutally Honest – President Trump Calls Top FBI Coup Plotters: “Human Scum”…



"Adam Mill" at AmGreat, Why Will This FBI Agent Not Be Prosecuted for Child Porn? The FBI/DOJ complex is remarkably protective of it's own.

Roger Kimball at Spec USA wonders Will the coronavirus succeed where Russiagate and Ukrainegate failed?

We don’t yet know how this new assault will play out, but we can see the order of battle and discern the major troop movements. Jonathan Chait, writing in New York magazine, arrived on cue with ‘Trump’s Entire Coronavirus Response Is Massive Political Corruption’, his usual sort of inconsequential light artillery, a congeries of tendentious anti-Trump assertions backed up with links that supported each assertion with more assertions and no evidence. You come away knowing that Jonathan Chait doesn’t like Donald Trump, but then you could have guessed that anyway.

The New York Times, our old paper of record, began wheeling in the heavy artillery about a week ago and has fired one barrage after the next. Bang: ‘He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus’. Crash: ‘Trump’s Slow Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic’. Kaboom: ‘Criticized for Pandemic Response, Trump Tries Shifting Blame to the WHO’. Yesterday, we had Thomas ‘I-like-China’ Friedman warning that ‘Trump Is Asking Us to Play Russian Roulette With Our Lives’. I admired the way he got ‘Russia’ into the story, hoping, no doubt, that the echo of investigations past would count against the president. The Times followed up that pathetic column with ‘The Coronavirus in America: The Year Ahead’, an interminable ‘1619-Project’-style spread in which multiple ‘experts’ shouted that Trump had done too little too late, and that any attempt to open up the country would be tantamount to murder. I particularly liked the scary Diane Arbus-like black-and-white photographs, especially the one of huge refrigerator trucks being used as a makeshift morgue to store bodies. Nice touch, boys.

Will the corona cavalcade be any more effective as an anti-Trump assault weapon than the Russian Collusion Delusion or the lame Ukraine blame game? I doubt it. But the Dems do have one big advantage this time around. The hysteria that they help fan and spread has taken a woeful toll on the economy; people are suffering. One of Donald Trump’s biggest achievements was to have fostered an America-first spirit which saw rising wages, especially at the bottom, and culminated in historically low unemployment. That has all been crushed, much to the evident delight of Nancy ‘I-have-two-refrigerators-full-of-exotic-ice-cream’ Pelosi.

If, when November comes around, we are facing double digit unemployment and a marcescent stock market, Trump will face an uphill battle, even against a senile political relic like Joe Biden.

 Democrats are enjoying the pandemic a little too much.