Representative John Ratcliffe appears with Martha MacCallum to discuss the ongoing closed-door testimony from officials upset about President Trump’s unorthodox approach to foreign policy.
Mr. Ratcliffe notes the purposeful leaks from Chairman Adam Schiff and his Lawfare staff to their aligned media scribes are intentionally false by design.
The Christopher Steele dossier was called “Crown Material” by FBI agents within the small group during their 2016 political surveillance operation. The “Crown” description reflects the unofficial British intelligence aspect to the dossier as provided by Steele.
In May 2019 former House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy stated there are emails from former FBI Director James Comey that outline instructions from CIA Director John Brennan to include the “Crown Material” within the highly political Intelligence Community Assessment.
Specifically outlined by Gowdy, the wording of the Comey email is reported to say:
…”Brennan is insisting the Crown Material be included in the intel assessment.”
However, on May 23rd, 2017, in testimony -under oath- to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) John Brennan stated [@01:54:28]:
GOWDY: Director Brennan, do you know who commissioned the Steele dossier?
BRENNAN: I don’t.
GOWDY: Do you know if the bureau [FBI] ever relied on the Steele dossier as part of any court filing, applications?
BRENNAN: I have no awareness.
GOWDY: Did the CIA rely on it?
BRENNAN: No.
GOWDY: Why not?
BRENNAN: Because we didn’t. It wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done. Uh … it was not.
Finally….. Senator Rand Paul directly calls-out Senator Lindsey Graham, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee for doing absolutely NOTHING. At a certain point it becomes necessary to accept willful blindness for what it is…. Senator Graham wants to protect the Deep State more than Senator Graham wants to protect a constitutional republic.
It’s worth noting that Senator Rand Paul’s statement comes out at the same time Senator Lindsey Graham has said he will support the impeachment of President Trump as soon as the articles reach the Senate for trial.
Justin Trudeau celebrated an overwhelming victory following the results of the Canadian election – SEE RESULTS HERE – The Liberal party lost 21 seats but remained the majority parliamentary winner albeit without a majority. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a “solid mandate from the election results.” The Conservative party gained 27 seats and the most national votes, but remain the losing party. The New Democrat Party lost 15 seats and declared the 2019 election a major success for their agenda.
It’s all weird.
During their post election speeches the Liberals (Trudeau), Conservatives (Sheer), New Democrat Party (Singh) and the Green Party (May), all declared victory. It seemed like a hot mess of political messaging; but hey, that’s Canada.
Congratulations, I guess. (more…)
Leftists love to trot out Christine Lagarde as the pontificating elite to defend their multinational interests. Recently the former IMF leader was elected to take control of the European Central Bank. As a direct result, Ms. Lagarde is now taking an adverse position toward a strong U.S. economy and decrying the ‘America-First’ policies of President Trump that have removed the tentacles of global financial control.
If you follow trade, finance and the interests of the multinationals, this is actually quite funny. In this first brief interview segment Ms. Lagarde, has the elitist audacity to warn President Trump that lowering U.S. interest rates defeats the agenda of the EU. She doesn’t put it in those terms, but watch and we’ll explain:
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Notice how Lagarde magnanimously claims that lowering interest rates when the U.S. economy is strong, and the U.S. unemployment rate is at historic lows, could lead to rising prices inside the U.S. Too damned funny; how very kind of the EU to be worried about U.S. consumers… (pro tip: they ain’t).
What she’s really worried about is the dynamic that President Trump has created that is crushing the globalists. Let’s expand. (more…)
HPSCI Ranking member Devin Nunes appears on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo to outline the ridiculously political sate of Pelosi’s impeachment by decree and how Adam Schiff has shredded all precedent.
[wpvideo SQybVQQF] (more…)
With media reporting that U.S. Attorney John Durham has expanded the timeline and scope of his investigation into U.S. government and intelligence community activity during the 2016 election, there’s an interesting quote from NBC:
…”Justice Department officials have said that Durham has found something significant, and that critics should be careful.”…
The expanded investigative timeline is now into May 2017 when Mueller was appointed special counsel, and would mean all of the preceding (and surrounding) activity leading up to Mueller would be reviewed. With that carefully in mind….
During the 2016 effort to weaponize the institutions of government against the outside candidacy of Donald Trump, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) was headed by Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein. After the 2016 election Senator Feinstein abdicated her vice-chair position to Senator Mark Warner in January 2017. While the SSCI was engaged in their part of the 2016 effort Vice-Chair Feinstein’s lead staffer was a man named Daniel Jones. Dan Jones was the contact point between the SSCI and Fusion-GPS.
After the election, and after Feinstein abdicated, Dan Jones left the committee to continue paying Fusion-GPS (Glenn Simpson) for ongoing efforts toward the impeachment insurance policy angle.
Feinstein appears to have left because she didn’t want to deal with the consequences of a President Trump, IF he discovered the SSCI involvement. Dan Jones left because with a Trump presidency the SSCI, now co-chaired by Senator Mark Warner, needed arms-length plausible deniability amid their 2017 operations to continue the removal effort (soft coup).
The trail for this plausible deniability process and ongoing soft-coup effort first surfaces with Dan Jones appearing in the early 2017 text messages between Senator Warner and the liaison for Christopher Steele, lawyer and lobbyist Adam Waldman: (more…)
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy appears on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo to discuss ongoing politics in Washington DC.
McCarthy discusses the meeting between Speaker Pelosi and President Trump and the ongoing fiasco with Pelosi’s “official impeachment inquiry” by decree.
White House chief-of-staff Mick Mulvaney appears on Fox News Sunday with swamp gatekeeper Chris Wallace. As customary Wallace uses the Share Blue talking points, one example: Notice how Wallace says “a statement from a senior justice department official”, then puts up an “anonymous” quote. Official statements from the DOJ are not anonymous.
Within today’s reporting from the New York Times and NBC, a key aspect is how CIA analysts are worried about explaining and/or justifying the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA). As such it is well worth remembering information about John Durham’s originating focus from June, 2019: Against the backdrop of the DOJ admitting FBI investigators never had access to the DNC servers to verify a Russian hack; and with new information about the FBI receiving partial and redacted analysis from Crowdstrike; the review by U.S. Attorney John Durham toward the downstream assessment/claims of the CIA takes on new meaning.
CTH has previously outlined how the December 29th, 2016, Joint Analysis Report (JAR) on Russia Cyber Activity was a quickly compiled bunch of nonsense about Russian hacking.
The JAR was followed a week later by the January 7th, 2017, Intelligence Community Assessment. The ICA took the ridiculous construct of the JAR and then overlaid a political narrative that Russia was trying to help Donald Trump.
The ICA was the brain-trust of John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey. While the majority of content was from the CIA, some of the content within the ICA was written by FBI Agent Peter Strzok who held a unique “insurance policy” interest in how the report could be utilized in 2017. NSA Director Mike Rogers would not sign up to the “high confidence” claims, likely because he saw through the political motives of the report. (more…)