Against the backdrop of the insufferable, and ever apoplectic, DC political gamesmanship, President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump are enjoying a nice evening dinner tonight at Trump International Hotel in DC. A fitting, and contrasting optic considering current events.
NBC propagandist, Kelly O’Donnell, dons her ghillie suit and hides amid the hotel plants to capture the possible culinary scandal.
Meanwhile President Trump’s lawyer Ty Cobb tells the New York Times the MAGA president has no worries.
WASHINGTON – […] Ty Cobb told the New York Times Trump is confident neither Manafort nor Flynn has incriminating information about the president. “The president has no concerns in terms of any impact, as to what happens to them, on his campaign or on the White House,” Cobb said.
Following yesterday’s comments by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, where he agreed with the position of President Trump that all JFK documents should be released, President Trump tweets the documents are forthcoming:
Last week, the firm behind the contract for the Russian Dossier, Fusion GPS, requested that a U.S. District judge block congressional investigators from access, via a previous subpoena, to its bank records. The judge gave the House Intelligence Committee lawyers and Fusion GPS a week to see if they could work out a mutual agreement on the production of the records.
Yesterday the attorneys for Fusion GPS and the House Intelligence Committee agreed to terms for releasing the bank records. The intel committee will receive the bank records to continue their investigation, but the documents will be sealed from public scrutiny:
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During the week-long negotiations between Fusion GPS and congressional lawyers, multiple funding sources were mysteriously leaked. One of the leaks showed The Washington Free Beacon and billionaire Paul Singer initially contracted with Fusion GPS in 2015 for initial opposition research against candidate Donald Trump, seemingly for the benefit of WFB and Singer’s preferred candidate Marco Rubio. That commissioned research ended in March/April of 2016 when it was clear that Rubio could not win the nomination. (more…)
Notice how the New York Times and Washington Post are staying away from the CNN story about the upcoming Robert Mueller indictments. There’s a good reason for that…
….Things That Make Other Things Make Sense:
Back on January 10th, 2017, when CNN first began emphasizing the Russian Dossier and how it related to the ‘vast Russian conspiracy’ CTH knew from the way it was being pitched that something was sketchy about CNN’s reporting. It wasn’t just the story they were selling; it was a very specific cast of characters selling it. We immediately NOTED IT HERE.
Jake Tapper, Jim Sciutto, Evan Perez and Carl Bernstein was the CNN crew assembled to talk about the Clinton/DNC funded -and Fusion GPS contracted- Christopher Steele ‘dossier’. Evan Perez had some rather sketchy stories in the weeks prior to their January 10th narrative roll out. Again the back story is important –SEE HERE–
Well, fast forward to now – and today The Daily Caller is reporting that Evan Perez is actually close friends with the people behind Fusion GPS. VERY close friends. Like, ‘go on vacation together’ type friends: VERY IMPORTANT READ
DAILY CALLER – CNN’s reporting on the Trump-Russia dossier has left out at least one crucial fact: the close ties between the network and the opposition research firm at the center of the dossier controversy.
CNN’s reporting on the dossier, led by justice correspondent Evan Perez, has been favorable to the firm, Fusion GPS, and hyped the dossier’s credibility. Left out of Perez’s reporting, which has relied largely on unnamed sources, is his personal closeness to Fusion GPS’ operatives. (continue reading)
The leak from a sealed grand jury indictment within the special counsel Robert Mueller investigation, writ large, has everyone a-twitter… Perhaps, a reminder is in order. First lesson from the DC Swamp – Everything is about politics. It’s not about the law; it’s not about the judiciary; it’s not about what’s legal, or the illegality of behavior; only politics. These are not legal issues; the entities involved are not connected to legal or illegal application of laws as they relate to the rest of American society.
You cannot view the current action through the transactional prism of modern judicial proceedings as they relate to you and me. These are political cases that use the venue of the legal system. They use the legal system to play out the optics and narrative of political battles for ideological wins and losses.
The closest reminder you might have familiarity with would be the case against George Zimmerman (never about the legal system); or the case against officer Darren Wilson; again, it was never about the legal system. Those were political cases run through the matrix of the legal system. So too is this entire DC partisan dysfunctional investigative construct -surrounding all of the current DC cases- not about the application of law, it is about politics. Period.
The notification from the FBI through the DOJ -to allow the unknown 2010 FBI witness to testify to congress about the Uranium One investigation- has initiated a responsive action from Robert Mueller to save and use his political leverage. This is not about laws broken; this is about political leverage to be retained. (more…)
Washington (CNN) A federal grand jury in Washington, DC, on Friday approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to sources briefed on the matter.
The charges are still sealed under orders from a federal judge. Plans were prepared Friday for anyone charged to be taken into custody as soon as Monday, the sources said. It is unclear what the charges are. A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment. (read more)
House intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes announces the congressional probe into the Russian Uranium One deal. As described, the initial part of the probe will be to discover if there was actually an ongoing FBI investigation into the company at the time the Obama administration gave the green light for the controversial purchase.
In order to answer that originating question the DOJ has released an FBI informant from their non disclosure agreement (NDA). If it is confirmed the FBI was actually conducting an investigation – the additional lines of probative value will encompass how the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) approved the purchase during an ongoing FBI investigation.
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If the FBI was investigating, and if CFIUS approved the purchase despite the investigation, then it appears congress would move to the third probative point “why”?
Within the third probative point is where the possibility of a quid-pro-quo with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton comes into play. The financial dynamic behind Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation is substantive, factual, generally well cited, and potentially illegal albeit difficult to prove.
It is within that third dynamic that WikiLeaks previously outlined the exceptionally coincidental connections which align with the quid-pro-quo and encompass Hillary/Bill Clinton, John Podesta, and Russian business and governmental interests. (more…)
WHITE HOUSE – Today, President Donald J. Trump took action to ensure release of the remaining President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records. Accordingly, the National Archives and Records Administration will make approximately 2,800 records available in full for public access today.
The remaining records will be released with agency-proposed redactions on a rolling basis in the coming weeks. The President has demanded unprecedented transparency from the agencies and directed them to minimize redactions without delay. The National Archives will therefore release more records, with redactions only in the rarest of circumstances, by the deadline of April 26, 2018. – Files Available Here –
And yes Lee Harvey Oswald was trained by the CIA: “Oswald subject was trained, under cover of the office of Naval Intelligence, for Soviet assignments.” (more…)
Apparently, prior to the Washington Post revealing the DNC and Clinton Campaign paid for the “Russian Dossier”, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (DNC) and John Podesta (campaign) testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee they knew nothing about who and how the Steele Dossier was financed…
…but wait, it gets better.
Sitting beside John Podesta when he gave his Senate testimony was, wait for it,.. attorney Marc Elias. Yup, the campaign and DNC lawyer who actually wrote the checks to Fusion GPS to pay Christopher Steele. Whoopsie. (Via CNN) Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta and former Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz both privately denied to congressional Russia investigators that they had any knowledge about an arrangement to pay for opposition research on President Donald Trump, three sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
The interviews happened before this week’s disclosure that the Clinton campaign and DNC paid for the research. Senate investigators may seek to further question the two top Democrats and dig deeper on the origins of the so-called Trump dossier, one of the sources briefed on the matter said. (more…)
In the 48 hours since the Washington Post outlined the financial backing for the Christopher Steele “Russian Dossier” as the Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC, the Democrat apparatus writ large has been trying to obfuscate and distance themselves from it. Yesterday Clinton campaign Spokesman Brian Fallon denied his knowledge of the campaign financing Fusion GPS for the commissioned dossier contract.
Today, in the latest laughable attempt at dodge-ball Hillary Clinton is now stating she didn’t know her campaign was paying for it:
(NYT) […] Officials from the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C. have said they were unaware that Perkins Coie facilitated the research on their behalf, even though the law firm was using their money to pay for it.
Even Mrs. Clinton only found about Mr. Steele’s research after Buzzfeed published the dossier, according to two associates who discussed the matter with her. They said that she was disappointed that the research — as well as the fact that the F.B.I. was looking into connections between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia — was not made public before Election Day. (read more – link)
The reason the financing of the dossier is ultimately so relevant is because it shreds the entire narrative that the Russians were trying to help candidate Donald Trump.
A strong, heck, even a moderate application of common sense would accept that the dossier was created to undermine candidate Trump, to the benefit of Hillary Clinton, and the publication of the generally refuted and debunked material post-election was only intended to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump. (more…)
