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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Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin appears with Maria Bartiromo to discuss the latest round of sanctions against Iran.  Secretary Mnuchin notes the economic engagement by China with Iran may open up Beijing to countermeasures for violating sanctions.
Additionally, Secretary Mnuchin outlines some aspects of the U.S-China ‘phase-one’ trade agreement and affirms the key point of enforcement mechanisms built into the agreement by U.S.T.R. Robert Lighthizer.  The official signing is this coming Wednesday.

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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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The results of a massive turnout vote in Taiwan reflect the country wishes to remain free from the overbearing influence of communist China.

(Hong Kong Free Press) […] Taiwan’s incumbent leader Tsai Ing-wen has won Saturday’s presidential election, defeating her Beijing-friendly rival Han Kuo-yu by a wide margin.
[…] With 8.1 million votes as of 10:30pm, Tsai won the highest number of votes of any presidential candidate in Taiwan’s history of democratic elections. Han, on the other hand, received just over 5.5 million votes, according to the Central Election Commission (CEC).

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Amid mounting pressure, and considerable laughs in her general direction, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has announced her intention to appoint impeachment managers next week and release the impeachment articles to the Senate:

Release the Flying Monkeys

…”I am very proud of the courage and patriotism exhibited by our House Democratic Caucus as we support and defend the Constitution. I have asked Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler to be prepared to bring to the Floor next week a resolution to appoint managers and transmit articles of impeachment to the Senate. I will be consulting with you at our Tuesday House Democratic Caucus meeting on how we proceed further.”… (link)

Marianne Williamson, the self-help author and spiritual guru for Oprah Winfrey who was going to initiate the U.S. Department of Peace, has announced today she is ending her bid for the office of the president.

“I ran for president to help forge another direction for our country. I wanted to discuss things I felt needed to be discussed that otherwise were not. I feel that we have done that. I stayed in the race to take advantage of every possible effort to share our message.”

According to Politico: “Williamson struggled to push back on the perception that she’s a “crystal woo woo lady” and expressed frustration after her debate performances that she was not being taken more seriously in the campaign. “A politics of conscience is still yet possible,” she concluded. “And yes….love will prevail.”
With Ms. Williamson’s exit the Democrat front-runners remain: Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and possibly Qasem Soleimani.
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