The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will be holding a public hearing today covering a variety of topics pertaining to ongoing “world wide threats”.
The participants of the hearing are: FBI Director Christopher Wray; CIA Director Gina Haspel; Office of the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats; Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency General Robert Ashley; National Security Agency (NSA) Director General Paul Nakasone; and Director Robert Cardillo National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The anticipated start time is 9:30am SSCI Website Link HERE – Alternate Livestream Here
According to the DOJ announcement released today three companies: Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Huawei Device USA Inc. and Skycom Tech Co. Ltd. are charged with bank fraud and conspiracy to commit bank fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and conspiracy to violate IEEPA, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Huawei and Huawei USA are charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice related to the grand jury investigation in the Eastern District of New York.
Additionally Ms. Meng Wanzhou is charged with bank fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracies to commit bank and wire fraud. Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew G. Whitaker, Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Secretary Wilbur Ross of the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Attorney Richard P. Donoghue for the Eastern District of New York, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and Assistant Attorney General John C. Demers of the National Security Division, announced the charges:
Internal polling and fear of resistance backlash must be significant for the democrats. President Donald Trump accepted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s invitation to deliver his State of the Union speech on Feb. 5, a week later than originally scheduled.
Beware of hyped headlines. AAG Matthew Whitaker made some remarks today about the Robert Mueller probe “hopefully, being close to completed”. That’s pretty vague. Watch:
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The Mueller probe will end at the closely coordinated and pre-selected time when Mueller hands off his investigation to Elijah Cummings (WH oversight), Adam Schiff (HPSCI), and Jerry Nadler (Judiciary). That timing looks to be around the end of February if current congressional witness schedules remain unchanged.
The timing will also be dictated by how the resistance view William Barr taking office. Keeping in mind the political pantomime has to build in some hype-time for congress to argue with DOJ (build a narrative) about Mueller’s report while media align with a new found demand for DOJ transparency. (more…)
Devin Nunes dropped a bombshell yesterday in an interview with Maria Bartiromo [Video Here]. Many people are overlooking the implications of his speculation; and, more importantly how Nunes statement answers just about every contradictory question people have carried. Including:
Why Rosenstein introduced Mueller to President Trump the day before he was appointed as Special Counsel?
Why President Trump has NOT been able to declassify documents? and
Why President Trump is, and will always be, hamstrung by the Mueller investigation?
In short, Devin Nunes speculated that Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein put the substantive allegations from the Fusion-GPS/Ohr/Steele Dossier into his investigative instructions (full pdf below) that he gave Robert Mueller.
If it is accurate that Rosenstein charged Robert Mueller with investigating the dossier claims; and if Nunes is accurate that the DOJ investigative target, a derivative of the dossier, is Donald Trump; well, everything starts to make a hell of a lot more sense.
If the mandate given to Robert Mueller was to specifically investigate the sitting president of the United States as an active participant, and subsequent target, for a counterintelligence operation, then DAG Rod Rosenstein -and Mueller- would have to hide that mandate from everyone and anyone. (more…)
The widely held view of the process is/was that Rod Rosenstein selected Robert Mueller as special counsel, and following that selection Mueller created his team. The perspective from CTH research is slightly different.
CTH believes that following the firing of FBI Director James Comey, the FBI Chief Legal Counsel, Jim Baker and FBI Deputy Director, Andrew McCabe; together with the corrupt small group that was involved in the prior year’s counterintelligence investigation; reacted to Comey’s firing by pressuring Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint their preferred person, Robert Mueller.
Within this internal debate (May 2017); at the time this construct was being argued; is when the famous comment from Rosenstein originates: “what do you want me to do, wear a wire?” The corrupt FBI investigative crew; having initiated and continued “Crossfire Hurricane”; including people from the DOJ-NSD side (Ohr, Weissmann, etc) were pressuring Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel….. but not just any special counsel.. Baker and McCabe had the person pre-selected. That person was Robert Mueller.
Obviously we can see the reason for this FBI/DOJ crew to need a special counsel. As career corruptocrats they were operating from a mindset of mitigating risk to themselves and continuing to advance on the objective to attack the executive office through their investigative schemes. The key point here is subtle but very significant. Robert Mueller didn’t select his team, the corrupt team selected him.
Last year, when CTH predicted the sequence of events Democrats would utilize for their impeachment strategy (full reference information below), we outlined the specific likelihood, as a telling tripwire, that HPSCI Chairman would target Donald Trump Jr. as the second person within their plan. [Michael Cohen would be first]
Affirming that prediction, today Adam Schiff has an interview with George Stephanopoulos and outlines EXACTLY that roadmap:
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Pay particularly close attention to this exchange. (Remember, none of this discussion is organic. These questions, and this approach to this narrative, were discussed and planned in advance):
STEPHANOPOULOS – “Your colleague on the committee, Congresswoman Jackie Speier, told CNN that she believes that Donald Trump Jr. lied to your committee on at least two occasions. Do you agree?”
SCHIFF – “Well, I’d like the special counsel to have access to Don Jr.’s testimony and determine whether it is evidence of — of false statements,” Schiff replied, adding “I think — and I greatly appreciate the seriousness with which the special counsel takes lying to Congress — so I’ll let Bob Mueller be the judge of that. But one of the first acts, if not the first act, of our committee will be to send all of these transcripts of all the witnesses to Bob Mueller so that he can consider whether additional perjury charges are warranted.”
Roger Stone appears on ABC’s This Week with DNC narrative engineer and former White House staff for Bill Clinton, George Stephanopoulos, to discuss his political indictment.
*NOTICE* Watch how Stephanopoulos is specifically reading the DNC provided manuscript of questions… Stephanopoulos is so concerned about the getting the specific wording correct, he actually reads the script during the interview. [kind of funny]
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Team Mueller are accusing Roger Stone of trying to figure out what WikiLeaks might be publishing during the 2016 election. Almost everyone watching the presidential election was doing the same thing, including people in the Trump campaign; however, only team Mueller can ridiculously criminalize it.
Last point on this…. {because it pegs my frustratometer} If you understand the ridiculously stupid underlying premise behind these originating charges; and you understand that DAG Rod Rosenstein and presumably AAG Matt Whitaker, are approvers of overall indictment content therein; and you accept that 29 heavily armed FBI officers and SWAT officials with armored vehicles were dispatched to a pre-dawn raid of 66-year-old Roger Stone, well: what does that tell you about the current DOJ?
The willfully blind ‘trust the plan‘ crew really needs to spend some time in contemplation of that question. (more…)
It is a rather incredulous dynamic where President Trump is fighting to secure the southern border, while the Democrat speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, coordinates resistance bribes from Mexican cartels to stop him. I digress…
In this segment from Fox News Sunday, acting Chief-of-Staff Mick Mulvaney discusses the issues around trying to get funding for U.S. border security and the possibility of another government shutdown.
Michael Isikoff highlighted how media is enmeshed within “Spygate” in February when he admitted his reporting was being used by the DOJ and FBI to advance the political objectives of the intelligence community. Additionally, FBI investigator Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page were shown in their text messages to be leaking stories from the Clinton Investigation, the Trump investigation, and the Mueller investigation to journalists at Politico, The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. –SEE HERE–
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was busted by the Inspector General leaking stories to the media and then lying about it to INSD and IG investigators. FBI Director James Comey admitted to leaking stories to the New York Times, hiring his friend Andrew Richman (off-the-books), giving him access to FBI and NSA databases, and then leaking information to Richman along with another friend Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare blog.
Lest we forget, the IG report on how the FBI handled the Clinton investigation revealed that dozens of FBI officials were actually taking bribes from the media for information:
IG REPORT – We identified numerous FBI employees, at all levels of the organization and with no official reason to be in contact with the media, who were nevertheless in frequent contact with reporters. Attached to this report as Attachments E and F are two link charts that reflect the volume of communications that we identified between FBI employees and media representatives in April/May and October 2016. We have profound concerns about the volume and extent of unauthorized media contacts by FBI personnel that we have uncovered during our review.
