Some Scurrilous Russiagate

A scurrilous lot today (Hey, I got the speeling right on the first try!) Front Page Mag reacts to seeing the Mueller Team Disinfects Phone Evidence En Masse

Recently disclosed DOJ documents reveal that members of the Mueller team wiped their phones clean of any and all data prior to submitting them to the IG for his investigation. In total, there were 31 phones that were wiped clean (27 phones plus mobile phones that had been reassigned).

None of these phones were set to have their data backed up, so it is believed that the information cannot be recovered from a cloud or a backup server.

ALL of the people whose phones were wiped clean claimed to have had their phones wiped "by accident."

Yes, ALL of the people whose phones were wiped clean just “coincidentally” wiped them clean after they learned that the IG was going to conduct an investigation into the roots of “Crossfire Hurricane” (the counterintelligence investigation of the alleged “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia). But they also wiped their phones clean before their phones were turned in to the Inspector General.

Additionally, ALL of the phones that were wiped clean were wiped clean by the same methods: most entered the wrong password into their phones ten times. These were iPhones, which do not allow you to enter wrong passwords ten times in one sitting. You can do it a few times, and after that, you get locked out for a period of time (i.e. 45 minutes, then an hour the next time, etc.) In the interim, you get warning notifications that someone is trying to enter the wrong passcode into your phone in case it is being hacked. You always have the option of contacting your IT guy for help, but oddly, not one of the individuals in this narrative did so.
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Some coincidence, huh? No Russian collusion, Mueller team prosecutions for process crimes that would never have occurred but for the investigation, and now those same prosecutors and other members of the Mueller team "accidentally" deleted the information on their phones during the same time period using the same methods. The phones still work. They aren't broken. They just have no data.

Funny how that happened, isn't it? Alex Nitzberg at JTN reports that  Judicial Watch’s Fitton calls for criminal probe into Mueller team’s wiped phones and Fox reports that Rep. Collins presses Apple for information on wiping iPhone data amid Mueller team controversy. This has all been a great ad for iPhones on How to legally obstruct justice. 

“From the events described in the DOJ-released documents, it seems to be no coincidence that so many of Mueller’s staff members’ iPhones were wiped due to a forgotten passcode right before turning them in,” Collins wrote. “If my instinct is correct—that these individuals intentionally subverted potential efforts to investigate their actions during the Mueller investigation—it leads inquiring minds to wonder: what evidence was so damning that they felt the need to destroy it?”

Peter  Strzok thinks History Will See Me as a Patriot Defending America Against a Russian Attack on Our Elections. Unfortunately, history tends to be written by the winners, then rewritten by leftists.

Speaking of coup perpetrators, Molly McCann at Da Fed. In Atlantic Profile, Alex Vindman Claims To Love The Constitution He Keeps Trying To Destroy. He thought Obama appointed him to be the director of US foreign policy to Ukraine, and he wasn't about the let the Bad Orange Man tell him differently. 

Vindman wants to argue that foreign policy should be charted by “experts” within the bureaucracy, like himself, who study and determine the best course for America and the world. That flawed philosophy was on full display in Vindman and other civil servants’ testimonies during the impeachment hearings. When Vindman wrote that Trump’s call had undermined U.S. foreign policy, he meant Trump had undermined the preferred policy of unelected bureaucrats.

An interesting post from sundance at CTH on how Recently Released FISA Court Response to DOJ Reveals Direction of Durham Probe – DOJ Requested FISC Approvals…

A very interesting release by ODNI John Ratcliffe [LINK] highlights a June 25, 2020 response from the FISA court to the DOJ. There are five issues queried by the DOJ seeking guidance from the FISC. Each issue points to a specific path being taken by the DOJ in general… and the John Durham probe specifically.

Today, the ODNI, in consultation with the Department of Justice, releases a June 25, 2020, opinion by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) evaluating and approving limited circumstances under which the Government may temporarily retain, use, or disclose information that was unlawfully acquired pursuant to a FISC order. (more)

Important note: We are looking at this in hindsight. The response from the FISC was dated June 25, 2020, so the request for opinion from the court was before June 25th.

The court opinion tells us for the first time, the DOJ is admitting/stating that ALL FOUR of the Carter Page FISA applications were corrupt upon origination. This is a big deal. In previous filing with the court (January 2020) DOJ only refuted the predication for the second and third renewal.

Within the FISC reply we see the DOJ stating all four submissions contained material omissions and violations of “the duty of candor” (ie. lying) by the FBI investigative unit and the DOJ team that assembled the application(s).

It was never about Carter Page, it was about generating a plausible excuse to spy on Trump. 

Althouse, "In recent years, the Justice Department has sometimes acted more like a trade association for federal prosecutors than the administrator of a fair system of justice based on clear and sensible legal rules.

"In case after case, we have advanced and defended hyper-aggressive extensions of the criminal law. This is wrong and we must stop doing it.... We should want a fair system with clear rules that the people can understand. It does not serve the ends of justice to advocate for fuzzy and manipulable criminal prohibitions that maximize our options as prosecutors.... Advocating for clear and defined prohibitions will sometimes mean we cannot bring charges against someone whom we believe engaged in questionable conduct. But that is what it means to have a government of laws and not of men.... If criminal statutes are endlessly manipulable, then everything becomes a potential crime. Rather than watch policy experts debate the merits or demerits of a particular policy choice, we are nowadays treated to ad na[u]seum speculation by legal pundits — often former prosecutors themselves — that some action by the President, a senior official, or a member of congress constitutes a federal felony under this or that vague federal criminal statute. This criminalization of politics is not healthy. The criminal law is supposed to be reserved for the most egregious misconduct — conduct so bad that our society has decided it requires serious punishment, up to and including being locked away in a cage. These tools are not built to resolve political disputes and it would be a decidedly bad development for us to go the way of third world nations where new administrations routinely prosecute their predecessors for various ill-defined crimes against the state. The political winners ritually prosecuting the political losers is not the stuff of a mature democracy.... Our job is to prosecute people who commit clear crimes. It is not to use vague criminal statutes to police the mores of politics or general conduct of the citizenry. Indulging fanciful legal theories may seem right in a particular case under particular circumstances with a particularly unsavory defendant—but the systemic cost to our justice system is too much to bear."

Said Attorney General William Barr at the Hillsdale College Constitution Day event yesterday.

The NYT covered Barr's speech under the headline "Barr Defends Right to Intrude in Cases as He Sees Fit/The attorney general’s remarks scanned as a rebuke of career Justice Department lawyers who have questioned his level of involvement." This article portrays the speech as a response to accusations against Barr:
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The Washington Post article is "Barr accuses Justice Department of headhunting and meddling with politics." The article observes 2 points of hypocrisy. First, Trump seems to like the idea of prosecuting his political enemies:

When he was a candidate in 2016, Trump’s rallies frequently featured chants of “lock her up” in reference to his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Since he became president, the list of officials Trump has called to go to jail has expanded to include former FBI director James B. Comey, former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and others at the FBI involved with investigating his campaign....

And, second, Barr is said to have mentioned using the federal sedition law against the rioters (who are called "those committing violence amid the protest" by WaPo):

[Barr] specifically cited text having to do with opposing the government by force, one of the people [on a Justice Department conference call] said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal considerations.

WaPo signals to its readers not to go big on the drama over the mention of the sedition law: "In 2010, during the Obama administration, the Justice Department charged nine people with seditious conspiracy over an alleged plot to attack law enforcement."

What was that Obama era case? Speaking of politicized selectivity, it was against a Christian militia group. Here's the NYT article on the resolution of the case, "U.S. Judge in Michigan Acquits Militia Members of Sedition". . .

Jerry Dunleavy, WaEx, DOJ watchdog opens investigation into Roger Stone's sentencing. Well, OK then, but the AG runs the Justice Dept. 

The investigation by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz is reportedly “focused on events in February … when prosecutors for Stone have said they were told to seek a lighter sentence for Stone than they had previously considered,” according to anonymous sources cited by NBC News, with another source claiming testimony from former Stone prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky this summer “triggered” the watchdog’s office to open the inquiry.

“We welcome the review,” DOJ spokesperson Kerri Kupec told the Washington Examiner on Monday.

Stephanie Logan, a senior public affairs specialist with Horowitz’s office, told the Washington Examiner that “generally our practice is to not confirm or deny the existence of any ongoing investigation.”

John Solomon at JTN, Democrats had extensive contact with Ukrainian they now use for ‘red scare’ attack on GOP. Selective amnesia can be a wonderful thing. 

1) "US government memos corroborate Andrii Telizhenko was trusted by the Obama administration for many years before congressional Democrats turned on him," @jsolomonReports. Telizhenko was fine with them until he exposed their wrongdoing with Burisma. https://t.co/amRCKumKJ9

— J Michael Waller (@JMichaelWaller) September 16, 2020

Via the Wombat's In The Mailbox: 09.16.20, Don Surber: Sen. Tom Cotton Proposes Undoing What Biden Did For Red China

The billion bucks Red China gave Hunter Biden in 2014 during an official visit to Beijing by then-Vice President Joe Biden was payment for services rendered by the veep in the 1990s, who shepherded America's acceptance of trading with this enemy.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wants to undo that multi-trillion-dollar favor Biden (and the Senate and the Bush and Clinton administrations) did for the largest communist country in the world.

Yahoo News reported, "Cotton announced Monday that he is introducing legislation to repeal permanent most favored nation trade status, a designation that guarantees equal trading opportunity among a nation’s trade partners.

Chris White at Da Caller, Liz Cheney Asks The DOJ To Investigate Whether China, Russia Are Infiltrating US Environmental Groups. Funding certainly; infiltrating? Now that would be interesting!

“Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council, whose anti-fracking agendas align with the Kremlin’s, are low-hanging fruit for Russian influence,” Cheney wrote.

“It’s crucial for the Department of Justice to determine whether these foreign adversaries are working to influence U.S. environmental and energy policies, including by infiltrating or targeting these environmental NGOs,” Cheney said in a statement to the DCNF.

From Breitbart, filed under suits I want to succeed, Alan Dershowitz Sues CNN for Defamation over Impeachment Coverage

Dershowitz, who filed suit Wednesday in a federal court in Florida, alleges that CNN and its various commentators “doctored the tape” of his comments on the Senate floor in January to portray him as a kind of “Adolf Hitler” who believed that a president can break the law at will.

John Sexton at Hot Air, Commander: Claim That Russia Paid Bounties For Killing Of US Troops ‘Has Not Been Proved’, Ace, US CENTCOM Commander: There Isn't Proof of the Democrat-Media Conspiracy's Info Op Last Month About Russians Paying Bounties to the Taliban to Kill Americans; Claim Comes from the CIA, Who Are "Very Emotional" About the Argument

I'm not kidding. I know people sometimes say these things off-handedly, but the CIA has been turned inside-out into an agency whose goal is not to defend America but to subvert and defeat it.

It must be disbanded.

Enough of these government-paid insurrectionists.
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The fact that the CIA leaked this -- to Adam Schiff, no less! -- is proof that they must be disbanded.

In previous years, under previous presidents, the intelligence community was very careful about leaking claims like this.

Claims like this put the president in an impossible bind: either he can argue on behalf of Russia's innocence, or he can launch a nuclear attack on Russia.

There's really no middle path here. If Russia is killing US troops, we go to war.

So usually these things were handled secretly. Russia would be punished, but not in some high-profile way that would stir the public into demanding a nuclear retaliation on Russia.

But that's not how the Obama-ized CIA rolls, now. Now, each and every unverified suspicion they have, each bit of Hot Goss collected from Igor "Iggy" Danchenko's alcoholic friends at his local DC rum mill, is fit for immediate leaking to Adam Fucking Schiff and the whole of the GPSFusion-paid Black Ops Press.

Why, it's almost as if elements of the Deep State, with a leadership cadre infiltrated into the highest positions of the CIA, are attempting a "color revolution" coup d'etat against their own (supposed) country.