Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told her caucus earlier today she will bring a resolution to the floor tomorrow for a House vote to appoint impeachment managers and submit the two articles of impeachment to the Senate.  It appears Speaker Pelosi is timing the resolution to take oxygen from the White House signing of the U.S-China ‘phase one’ trade agreement, also expected tomorrow; a major win for the U.S. trade reset.
The Speaker made the announcement during a private caucus meeting.  However, Pelosi did not name the impeachment managers, that announcement is expected to be made at the same time as the house vote.

WASHINGTON DC – […] The resolution the House will vote on Wednesday will do three things: transmit the articles of impeachment against Trump; name the team of impeachment managers; and provide funding for the trial. Democrats and Republicans will have five minutes per side to debate the resolution on the floor, according to rules established during the House impeachment debate in December. (more)

As you review this story keep in the back of your mind that U.S. DC Attorney Jessie Liu has been recently moved to head the Financial Crimes Division of the Treasury Department.
CTH noted last year when John Fry, an intelligence analyst with the IRS’s law enforcement arm, was arrested that something more was happening in the background of his case and the DOJ case against Natalie Sours-Edwards.   Today Ms. Sours-Edwards pleads guilty to downloading & distributing the financial records of people connected to the Trump orbit.
You might remember back in May 2018 when sketchy porn lawyer Michael Avenetti was releasing U.S. Treasury notifications on Michael Cohen received from an unknown source within the Treasury Department [See Here].  You might also remember when New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow wrote a sympathetic article after talking to the leaking treasury official [See Here].  As a result the Treasury Inspector General began an investigation.

(VIA DOJ) Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards Illegally Repeatedly Transmitted SARs and Other Sensitive Government Information To A Reporter Resulting In Approximately 12 News Articles Over 1-Year Period.
Ms. Sours-Edwards, a former senior adviser at the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”), pled guilty today to conspiring to unlawfully disclose Suspicious Activity Reports (“SARs”).
Beginning in approximately October 2017, and lasting until her arrest in October 2018, EDWARDS agreed to and did unlawfully disclose numerous SARs to a reporter (“Reporter-1”), the substance of which were published over the course of approximately 12 articles by a news organization for which Reporter-1 worked (“News Organization-1”).

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DOJ-NSD lawyer David Kris has been a defender of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation and Lawfare critic of Devin Nunes’s 2018 memo on alleged FISA abuses.  Sketchy Mr. Kris was recently picked by FISC presiding judge James Boasberg, to serve as the court’s amicus curiae — a position that is supposed to provide impartial advice to the court.
Mr. Kris will oversee the implementation of “FISA reforms” following the IG report on serious abuses found in the DOJ and FBI’s political efforts to conduct surveillance on U.S. person Carter Page.  However, representative Devin Nunes shares his doubts & concerns:

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This is a little weedy, but it’s important….

In the second half of Devin Nunes interview with Maria Bartiromo today he was asked his thoughts about the FISA Court selecting David Kris as an FBI surveillance and compliance monitor.  The issue is quite important because the FBI FISA reforms and promises are essentially meaningless without some form of structural review process.
However, the new 2020 FISC Presiding Judge James Boasberg selecting David Kris has been noted by several people as a rather weak effort on behalf of the court.

As an outcome of our former FISA-702 reviews CTH has an entirely different reason for questioning the selection of Kris; there’s much more substantive reasons to be alarmed about it; but first here’s the general consensus opposition:

WASHINGTON – The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has stunned court-watchers by selecting David Kris — a former Obama administration lawyer who has appeared on “The Rachel Maddow Show” and written extensively in support of the FBI’s surveillance practices on the left-wing blog Lawfare — to oversee the FBI’s implementation of reforms in the wake of a damning Department of Justice inspector general report last year.
[…]  “Of all the people in the swamp … this is the guy that you come up with?” Nunes asked. “The guy that was accusing me of federal crimes? The guy that was defending the dirty cops at the FBI? … The court must be trying to abolish itself. There is long-term damage.”

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House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes appears with Maria Bartiromo to discuss two very important issues.  The first is the origination of the “whistle-blower” complaint and new issues surrounding Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson.  The second important subject is the background of newly installed FISA Court monitor, David Kris, to oversee the FBI reform promises.
CTH has some explosive new information which has been shared with Mr. Nunes on both issues; but we start with the interview and ICIG Michael Atkinson.

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Since our original research into Atkinson, there have been some rather interesting additional discoveries.
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House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy appears on Sunday Morning Futures to discuss the current status of Speaker Pelosi’s fraudulent impeachment effort.  Leader McCarthy emphasizes his claim that Pelosi’s intention is to block Bernie Sanders from achieving the democrat party presidential nomination.
However, there’s no rule that requires Senator Sanders to participate.  If Bernie Sanders wants to stay on the campaign trail while a senate impeachment trial is ongoing, he can.

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Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon joins Sunday Morning Futures to discuss rising support for democracy around the world and connects the movement to the impeachment effort against President Trump.  Big Stuff. Big Ugly type stuff.
A fired-up Bannon looks at the Senate impeachment trial as the “trial of the century”, where the professional political class gets brought into the trial and the framework becomes an expose’ on how President Trump is willing to take down the system.

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National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien appears on Fox News Sunday to discuss the recent conflicts with Iran, and the government of Iran blaming the U.S. for their shooting down of Ukraine Airline flight 752.

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With increased scrutiny toward the actions, and lack thereof, from current FBI Director Christopher Wray, another sketchy aspect deserves some scrutiny.
Hat Tip Techno-Fog for noting some remarkable FBI activity.

Supervisory Special Agent Joseph Pientka III was first identified by Senator Chuck Grassley in May of 2018 as the second FBI agent involved in the 2017 interview of Lt. General Michael Flynn.
Frustrated by the FBI stonewalling his Senate inquiry, Chairman Grassley dropped the revelation publicly on May 11th, 2018, in a letter to the FBI.

[…] the Committee’s oversight interest in the underlying documents requested more than a year ago now outweighs any legitimate executive branch interest in withholding it. So too does the Committee’s interest in learning the FBI agents’ actual assessments of their interview of Lt. Gen. Flynn, particularly given the apparent contradiction between what then Directory Comey told us in March 2017 and what he now claims.
[…] In addition, please make Special Agent Joe Pientka available for a transcribed interview with Committee staff no later than one week following the production of the requested documents… (link)

The FBI never produced Supervisory Special Agent (SSA-1) Joe Pientka for Chairman Grassley’s committee, and the conflict between the Senate Judiciary Committee and the FBI was never reconciled.  (The DOJ/FBI made it to the safety of the mid-term election.)
Additionally, every single document containing information about the investigative activity of FBI agent Pientka has kept his name redacted.  Not a single DOJ/FBI document has ever included his name.
However, around two months after Grassley outed his identity; we discover from the Inspector General that the DOJ-NSD (National Security Division) admitted to the FISA court that Agent Pientka was significantly less than forthcoming with “factual omissions” in the Title-1 surveillance application he assembled against Carter Page.
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President Trump asks: “Are these “dirty cops” going to pay a big price for the fraud they committed?” 

However, the only person who can honestly answer that question is the person in the mirror when President Trump brushes his teeth.   Perhaps forgotten…
In the spring of 2018 a group of congressional reps led by Devin Nunes, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert, Lee Zeldin and Bob Goodlatte, asked President Trump to declassify a series of documents so the public could see how former officials in the DOJ & FBI abused their offices and conducted political surveillance.
In September of 2018, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein asked President Trump not to declassify those same documents until after the Mueller probe was complete.  Rosenstein informed the President (confirmed in later POTUS interviews) that declassifying the material could be interpreted as impeding the Mueller investigation.
Two months later, in November 2018, the mid-term election took place.  Republicans lost the House and their committee chairs.  Many people suspected (I concur) the mid-term election was the real motive for the Sept. 2018 request from Rosenstein.  Four months after the mid-term, March 2019, the Mueller investigation of President Trump ended.
Two months after the Mueller probe ended U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, a profoundly supportive voice for DAG Rosenstein, asked President Trump to grant him unilateral declassification authority to assist the purposes and intents of his DOJ effort.  President Trump granted U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr with the authority to declassify on May 23rd, 2019; granting access to the same documents requested by congress a year earlier.
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