[FOX] A collection of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr's emails, texts and handwritten notes, reviewed by Fox News, reveals that he was deeply connected to the unverified Steele dossier as well as its author and, during the presidential election campaign, the alleged government surveillance abuses involving a Trump campaign official.
The dossier, which was used by federal officials to justify the surveillance of a top Trump aide, Carter Page, was created by Fusion GPS and paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Ohr wrote that Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy who wrote the salacious dossier, was "very concerned (abt) about [former FBI Director James] Comey's firing -- afraid they will be exposed."
The Ohr documents shed more light on Steele's activities before the presidential election. While Steele shopped the dossier to multiple media outlets, he also appeared to ask Ohr for help with a Russian oligarch -- Oleg Deripaska -- after rumors the U.S. might impose sanctions.
Ohr had a conflict of interest during the presidential campaign and transition, congressional investigators say, because his wife Nellie worked for Fusion GPS. Steele, an ex-British spy, was a key source cited by the FBI and Department of Justice to obtain a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant to monitor Page.
FBI INCORRECTLY TOLD FISA COURT FOUR TIMES THAT STEELE WASN'T SOURCE OF REPORT USED TO JUSTIFY CARTER PAGE SURVEILLANCE
After the FBI dropped Steele as a source in November 2016 over his contacts with the media, the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee found that Steele had maintained contact with government officials by effectively using Ohr as a back channel.
During recent congressional testimony, now-fired FBI agent Peter Strzok confirmed that "the FBI received documents and material from Mr. Ohr."
BLUF:
[TheFederalist] Once again, Ohr and Steele’s exchanges detailed by Solomon provide a hint: The day after Yate’s firing, Steele contacted Ohr, texting "doubtless a sad and crazy day for you re-SY," a clear reference to Sally Yates. "Just wanted to check you are OK, still in situ and able to help locally as discussed, along with your Bureau colleagues," Steele added. Then, after Ohr confirmed "I’m still here and able to help as discussed," Steele stressed that if Ohr was out at DOJ, he needed another "(Bureau?)" contact.
This exchange suggests Yates’ removal concerned Steele and left him worried that without Yates at the helm, Ohr’s continued role as a DOJ liaison for Steele was at risk, and that without Yates or Ohr, he would need to work directly with the FBI.
Was that because Yates approved of Ohr acting as a dossier courier for Steele and the FBI? If so, the Spygate scandal reaches into even higher echelons of the Deep State than previously known. Ohr has a pretty good incentive to come clean and expose anyone else at the DOJ (or in the Obama administration) involved in the decision to continue to use Steele as a source. Otherwise Ohr will hold sole responsibility for going rogue. Emphasis added.
#2
I recall lots of background info from open source media confirming Mrs Ohrs connection to the Agency. The shortwave license curiosity regarding the lack of NSA monitoring, and how all this has Brennan linkages. Toppling a duly elected President seems a possible conspiracy with that evil man at its core.
BLUF:
[Washington Examiner] "Director Brennan's recent statements purport to know as fact that the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign power," Burr said in a statement Thursday afternoon. "If Director Brennan's statement is based on intelligence he received while still leading the CIA, why didn't he include it in the Intelligence Community Assessment released in 2017? If his statement is based on intelligence he has seen since leaving office, it constitutes an intelligence breach."
Burr was referring to the January 2017 intelligence community assessment which determined Russia was behind an effort to interfere in the 2016 election which got Trump elected to White House. The North Carolina Republican went on to say Brennan using the media as an outlet to lash out at Trump may not have been a wise choice.
"If he has some other personal knowledge of or evidence of collusion it should be disclosed to the Special Counsel, not the New York Times," Burr continued, alluding to special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the federal Russia investigation. "If, however, Director Brennan's statement is purely political and based on conjecture, the president has full authority to revoke his security clearance as head of the Executive Branch."
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders announced the move to revoke Brennan's security clearance on Wednesday and read a statement from Trump, citing the "risks posed by his erratic conduct and behavior" as the impetus for the move.
[WSJ] Justice releases some damning documents, but much of the truth is still classified.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department have continued to insist they did nothing wrong in their Trump-Russia investigation. This week should finally bring an end to that claim, given the clear evidence of malfeasance via the use of Bruce Ohr.
Mr. Ohr was until last year associate deputy attorney general. He began feeding information to the FBI from dossier author Christopher Steele in late 2016‐after the FBI had terminated Mr. Steele as a confidential informant for violating the bureau’s rules. He also collected dirt from Glenn Simpson, cofounder of Fusion GPS, the opposition-research firm that worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and employed Mr. Steele. Altogether, the FBI pumped Mr. Ohr for information at least a dozen times, debriefs that remain in classified 302 forms.
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[Don Surber] Omarosa. The show trial for Paul Manafort. These are the things CNN chipmunks chattered about endlessly the last few days. But CNN has no news judgment because it is run by a moron with a Harvard degree and a Napoleon Complex.
To find the news, I read the South China Morning Post, which is worried spitless that the Red Chinese economy will tank like its stock market has.
(Its stocks overall have declined in value by 40% in the last three years. Our stocks are up 33% since we elected Trump. In the eight years from Obama's election to Trump's, the Dow rose by 33%.)
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Posted by: Frank G ||
08/17/2018 00:00 ||
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#1
Whenever folks talk about trade wars they assume both sides are equally damaged. That might have happened before the Great Depression but hardly seems the most likely scenerio and Trump was able to see the situation clearly.
China seems to have two options: (1) Losing face and agreeing to Trumps terms = America wins (2) Continuing as before and watching their economy collapse = America wins.
There is a war option as well but I think the odds of that are insignificant.
#2
China is far ahead of the USA in the "collapse gap" - regardless of Trump's actions. Virtually all large nations are virtual deadbeats, in the sense that they can never pay off the debts they have accumulated. China is much closer to economic collapse than the USA is. The whole world is vulnerable to the ongoing greatest debt bubble in world history.
h/t Gates of Vienna
[Politico] Looks like Allah is betting on the dollar.
Nearly a week has passed since a livid Recep Tayyip Erdogan thundered "they have dollars, we have God" in Washington’s direction.
So far, the Almighty isn’t helping. And while European officials say they would like to help (the last thing the EU needs at the moment is a destabilized Turkey) there’s little they can do but sit and watch.
For one thing, there’s no political will to get involved. Erdogan’s aggressive posture toward Turkey’s European neighbors in recent years, in particular Germany, has sapped his political capital on the Continent.
While some in Europe fear Turkey’s crisis could endanger the EU’s refugee deal with Ankara, that’s unlikely. The reason: Erdogan needs hard currency now more than ever. And the "refugee" deals don't work anyways.
Even the exposure of several large European banks to Turkey is unlikely to change Europe’s political calculus. Despite investor angst over the liabilities, which total about €150 billion, the exposure is a fraction of the sector’s overall loan book. That’s why JPMorgan describes the Turkey risk for Europe’s banks as "significant but manageable."
Europe’s trade exposure to Turkey is also limited. The country accounts for just 1.6 percent of German exports, for example.
Turkey’s crisis, the result of years of loose fiscal and monetary policies, is almost entirely of Erdogan’s own making. And a big part of what makes the situation so dangerous for Turkey is that Erdogan is the only one with the power to fix things.
[Ecosophia] In last week's thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we talked about the way that America's managerial aristocracy and its broad penumbra of lackeys and hangers-on retreated into a self-referential bubble to avoid noticing the consequences of their preferred policies. As they did so, those policies‐the metastatic growth of government regulation that strangled small businesses and transferred power and wealth to huge corporations and federal bureaucracies, the trade policies that forced working class wages and benefits down below subsistence levels, and the tacit policy of encouraging unlimited illegal immigration that created a vast labor pool of noncitizens who had no rights and thus could be exploited with impunity‐drove tens of millions of Americans into destitution and misery. Now it's time to start exploring how the blowback to those policies took shape. It looks long, like yesterday's Part 1, but I'm gonna read it all.
Part of that blowback came from within the working classes that took the brunt of the policies just named, and part of it came from other sectors of society that were shut out of the benefits of the bipartisan policy consensus and forced to carry a disproportionate share of the costs. Another element of it, though, unfolded from a policy that elites always embrace sooner or later: the habit of making sure that the educational system produces more people trained for managerial tasks than existing institutions can absorb. See, I told you it'd be interesting. RTWT.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/17/2018 10:02 ||
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[NationalReview] No doubt Ocasio-Cortez, at 28, is still young and inexperienced. But when she refers to her own supposedly stellar academic record, and then in a series of statements illustrates how poorly educated she is, one wonders, What exactly is the value of $300,000 Boston University degree?
We could ask the same about Sarah Jeong’s UC Berkeley B.A. and Harvard Law degrees. Years of Jeong’s racist tweets surfaced, creating a firestorm, shortly after the New York Times hired her as a writer and member of the editorial board. Responding to critics, the Times noted that it had reviewed Jeong’s social-media history before hiring her.
It is growing harder and harder to equate elite university branding with proof of knowledge. Barack Obama, another Harvard Law graduate, proved this depressing fact a number of times when he asserted that the Maldives were the Falklands, "corpsmen" was pronounced with a hard p, Austrians spoke a language called Austrian, there were 57 states, and Hawaii was in Asia.
Joe Biden, another law-school graduate, once stated that George W. Bush should have addressed the nation on television the way FDR did after the stock crash: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television . . ." Biden apparently forgot that FDR was not president in 1929 and that TVs weren’t introduced to the public until 1939.
The Trump revolution is often attributed to the angry pushback of the deplorables and irredeemables and all those who lacked the knack for getting with the global agenda. Perhaps. But it was also a popular consensus that our experts in government, the university, and the media were not very expert, and the résumé and letters behind their names increasingly denoted nothing much at all.
Posted by: Vast Right Wing Conspiracy ||
08/17/2018 00:00 ||
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#1
They got corrupted by (as usual) a huge flow of money out of Washington the Swamp. They jump to repeat Eisenhower's warning about the Military-Industrial complex but bury (as with most contemporary journalism that don't fit the narrative) his warning about academia -
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.
They sold their integrity much like Detroit sold its in the automotive world. Volume over quality. The bottom line. '73 embargo introduced Americans to Japanese cars that were solidly built, less expensive, fuel efficient, and not nickled and dimed to death on the invoice. Detroit never recovered.
Most state universities stated as A&Ms, agricultural and mechanical, practical need of the 19th Century. They've been corrupted through an indentured student population to cover everything and specifically so much that has no practical application outside of academia itself.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Don Surber] Omarosa. The show trial for Paul Manafort. These are the things CNN chipmunks chattered about endlessly the last few days. But CNN has no news judgment because it is run by a moron with a Harvard degree and a Napoleon Complex.
