After the DOJ/FBI advanced their defensive efforts last weekend via the New York Times and NBC, now the CIA/ODNI faction step forth with the same intents and purposes.
CIA defending journalist Natasha Bertrand has been participating in the multi-year PR effort which helped frame the CIA/ODNI talking points against President Trump, and she is deployed again in the latest effort within Politico.   The timing here is predictable.

(Via Politico) President Donald Trump’s obsession with former CIA director John Brennan could be on a collision course with an ongoing Justice Department probe as Attorney General Bill Barr takes a more hands-on approach to examining the intelligence community’s actions in 2016.
[…] Durham’s report is likely to land well after the results of an inquiry by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, who is examining the FBI’s applications to a secret court in 2016 and 2017 to obtain surveillance warrants on a Trump campaign aide.

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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:
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The background context has already been outlined –SEE HERE– so we won’t repeat.  Instead, we look at today’s defensive narrative engineering from the New York Times with a similar perspective, but a different set of reminders.
Content and distribution tells us this information is from the DOJ and FBI faction of the “Small Group“.  Not accidentally, and VERY importantly, this is the same faction under the microscope of Inspector General Michael Horowitz and his pending IG report.  Additionally, and again very importantly, the principles within the IG report have already had an opportunity to review the part of the upcoming report that highlights their conduct.

So this New York Times reporting, from conversations with the DOJ and FBI small group participants, is coming out in advance of the IG report and with their review in mind.
Here’s the article, emphasis mine:

WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors reviewing the origins of the Russia investigation have asked witnesses pointed questions about any anti-Trump bias among former F.B.I. officials who are frequent targets of President Trump and about the earliest steps they took in the Russia inquiry, according to former officials and other people familiar with the review.

[Note “prosecutors” is plural; more than one.  “prosecutors” also implies a shift from investigative review, to a likelihood of criminal conduct.  The media presentation of John Durham has gone from a single U.S. Attorney with a mandate from his boss, to a group of people, ‘prosecutors’, working with the U.S. Attorney.]
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The activity of the “small group” of coup plotters consists of three generalized subsidiary agencies: (1) DOJ/FBI, (2) CIA/ODNI, and (3) The State Department.
Within each “small group faction” a years-long review of their narrative constructs shows the groups have specific and unique media outlets for their offensive (’16, ’17) and defensive (’18, ’19) propaganda efforts.
•The DOJ/FBI faction of the “small group” leaks to narrative engineers at the New York Times and NBC. •The CIA/ODNI faction utilize the Washington Post and ABC; and •the State Dept. faction use CNN and CBS. Each faction uses the same reporters & pundits for their distribution. This pattern, albeit generalized, has been consistent for several years.

The originating media entity -utilizing the leaks, opinions and agenda of the faction most concerned- starts the process. The secondary media groups come in for support – reporting on the reporting; and then reporting on the reporting of the reporting… and so on. This process provides a concentric distribution effort to bolster the originating premise.
Similar to the Journ-o-list effort of Ezra Klein, all of the ideologically aligned reporters share information for the larger process of defending the prior activity and advancing a unified narrative. [Reference Buzzfeed’s Ali Watkins sharing leaks from SSCI Security Director James Wolfe to her peers at WaPo and New York Times while she had sex with the source to keep the information pipeline open.]
It is important to remember this concerted process whenever we are reviewing media articles concerning the matters of interest to each of the “small group” factions.
In essence, the propagandists within the media are the same; and the sources for the positions reflected in the articles are the same. Wash, rinse and repeat depending on the identified risk.
So today we see NBC and the New York Times going “out front” on behalf of their interests. Referencing the faction each outlet represents we see the *reporting* is to defend the interests of the DOJ and FBI.
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Inside an otherwise innocuous court filing (full pdf below), General Mike Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, files a motion to compel (MTC) in an effort to gain discovery of the content from two cell phones belonging to Joseph Mifsud.   [Hat Tip Techno Fog]
Apparently, according to the information within the filing, the DOJ has somehow gained custody of two cell phones belonging to Mr. Mifsud:

(Source Link)

The filing notes that “western intelligence” likely tasked Mr. Mifsud against General Flynn as early as 2014 in order to set up “connections with certain Russians” for later use against him.  Essentially, an intelligence entrapment scheme.
Unfortunately the filing only identifies the cell phones along with the request for production of the content therein.  However, the fact the DOJ has two cell phones belonging to Joseph Mifsud opens up a whole bunch of questions:
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Maria Bartiromo had initially reported the IG report on the Carter Page FISA situation was going to be released around the end of this week.  Ms. Bartiromo is now reporting a delay:

It’s the “classifications being made” part that raises concern.  President Trump granted Attorney General Bill Barr with declassification authority on May 23rd, 2019, so that any classification issues could be minimized and maximum transparency afforded.
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There are times during research when searching for details leaves the obviously immediate questions unanswered.  This is one of those examples.  Judicial Watch is hot on the trail of a State Department effort to monitor domestic political opposition.
Specifically former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, initiated a request for State Dept. officials to conduct surveillance on: Jack Posobiec, Donald Trump Jr., Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Michael McFaul (Obama’s ambassador to Russia), Dan Bongino, Ryan Saavedra, Rudy Giuliani, Sebastian Gorka, John Solomon, Lou Dobbs, Pamella Geller and Sara Carter.
More details:

(Via JW) Judicial Watch has obtained information indicating Yovanovitch may have violated laws and government regulations by ordering subordinates to target certain U.S. persons using State Department resources.
Yovanovitch reportedly ordered monitoring keyed to the following search terms: Biden, Giuliani, Soros and Yovanovitch. Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the State Department and will continue gathering facts from government sources.

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North Carolina republican Mark Meadows has been one of the key republican leaders who have remained in Washington DC during the recess break so that he can quickly attend the secret back-room hearings being held by Chairman Adam Schiff.  In this interview Mr. Meadows discusses the current status of the impeachment effort.
Additionally, Meadows discusses what he knows of the documents provided to Inspector General Horowitz for his pending release of the FISA investigation.   Meadows predicts the IG report will be a “scathing rebuke” of the FBI; however, Meadows also predicts the accountability aspect will only end with recommendations for FISA process changes.
[wpvideo DikGDx5w]
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There is a serious problem here…

FISA Court judges Rosemary Collyer (declassified 2017) and James Boasberg (declassified 2019) both identified issues with the NSA database being exploited for unauthorized reasons.  We have a large amount of supplemental research to see through most of Collyer’s report and we are now starting the same process for Boasberg.  However, an alarming possibility makes it important to outline a rough draft of what appears present.
Initially when Collyer’s report was declassified in April 2017 we were able to start assembling additional circumstantial and direct evidence.  Two years of releases allowed us to see a more detailed picture.
Additional documents, direct testimony from NSA Director Mike Rogers, and later connected material from court filings, classified releases and ODNI statements made the understanding much clearer.  What became visible was a process of using the NSA database for political surveillance. [SEE HERE]
With the Boasberg report we do not yet have enough supportive material to identify specific purposes.  However, directly from the report itself there is a lot of information that shows a continuum of database activity that did not stop after Collyer’s warnings, and the NSA promises.   It seems, the political exploitation continues; and with that in mind some recent events are much more troubling.
Boasberg notes the “about” query option that NSA Director Mike Rogers halted, technically didn’t stop.   Instead operators used the “to and from” option almost identically as the “about” queries for downstream data review and extraction.  The FISA Appellate Court appointed amici curiae to review Boasberg’s opinion and reconcile counter claims by the FBI.   Boasberg was never satisfied despite the FISC-R amicus assurances. His opinion reflects valid judicial cynicism within his reluctant re-authorization.
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The initial reports came last night indicating that former South Carolina republican congressman Trey Gowdy has joined President Trump’s legal team. Reporting today confirms that Trey Gowdy is no longer a Fox News contributor.
Specifically it appears Mr. Gowdy has joined the team as a proactive measure before a House impeachment vote which then leads to a trial in the Senate.
Given Gowdy’s specific legal skillset, and considering he is well known amid Senate chambers, I would surmise Gowdy would be the primary defense orator during a senate trial.
In that regard this is a good pick.
We do not yet know who House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will select to be the House “Impeachment Managers”, for all intents and purposes the House impeachment prosecutors.  However, given recent court positioning it seems possible Lawfare member Douglas Letter -current House counsel- will be one of the two impeachment managers.
Mr. Gowdy has a rather mixed past in the political sphere. Heck, to be direct, his history of purple ties and political fence-positioning has been more than a little annoying. However, the 55-year-old former prosecutor is a strong litigator known for skilled oration and quick thinking in verbal arguments.
A smart chap with a disarming southern drawl is an asset in court. Considering the public spectacle of a Senate trial, this strength outweighs his prior shortcomings.
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