HOW MANY PEOPLE DIED IN PUERTO RICO? – DEPENDS ON WHO YOU ASK – WHO WAS ULTIMATELY RESPONSIBLE

Did 65 die or  was it 3000? And where are the bodies? Who is to blame for this? First of all Puerto Rico is a welfare sanctuary run to the ground by Democrats – a failed state. Their infrastructure was was comparable to those of third world countries – think South Africa, Iran and Iraq. Electricity was dole out by the hour, water systems in many cases were inoperable. But the failed state, 41% of the employed worked for the government, was an accident waiting to happen; and it did.

Most deaths after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico are blamed on interruptions in medical care due to power outages and blocked or washed out roads, said the report published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Approximately one-third of post-hurricane deaths were reported by household members as being caused by delayed or prevented access to medical care,” said the report.”

The bottom line is two fold; One those responsible for the majority of deaths were the elected government officials of Puerto Rico, who were irresponsible; their obligation was to prepare and warn the people of the coming disaster; this they did not do.

Secondly, to blame Trump for his lack of empathy is insinuating that the President of the United States caused the problem. He did not. But we must remind those who place blame of the FACT that those who live in a Welfare State always depend on others to do their bidding. And so it was with Puerto Rico when hurricane Maria hit. The citizens waited for the Government to step in and lend a helping hand while they sat idly by, waiting for disaster to hit. 

“WE WILL FIND YOU” DEEP STATE UNMASKED – PROJECT VERITAS

SOMETHING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO NIRVANA – GOOGLE GOT HIT ON THE WAY OUT

Google is know to have their biases. Pushing their political agenda through the subliminal messages targeting those who disagree with their philosophy. This is better known as Yellow Journalism Yes, it is true that owners of media organizations push their political philosophy on others, but we know going it that they will do that. Google is a search engine that employs advertising to fund their free goodies. What a shock to them though was the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election. Google could not believe the number, having double and triple checked them, they still were shocked on what happened.

“Evil spirits”, such as “Paid Puffery” and “Suggestiveness”, spew from “the modern daily press” in this Puckcartoon of November 21, 1888

 

Google stepped up efforts to “get out the Latino vote” thinking it would be the ticket to a Hillary victory.

A Google executive’s leaked email reveals efforts to increase Latino turnout prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the executive’s “surprise” at Donald Trump’s performance among Latino voters.  The 675-word email, first obtained exclusively by Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” was written by the tech giant’s former head of multicultural marketing and details a range of efforts to increase Latino turnout, including the support of a partner organization that helped to drive voters to the polls.

“Ultimately, after all was said and one [sic], the Latino community did come out to vote, and completely surprised us. We never anticipated that 29% of Latinos would vote for Trump(HAHA). No one did,” the executive wrote.

TREASON BY ANY OTHER WORD IS STILL TREASON – JOHN KERRY IS TODAY’S BENEDICT ARNOLD

Ex Secretary of State, John Kerry, a proven liar regarding his infamous “swift boat” affair; a heretic to say the least. A typical white flag Obama aficionado looking to demonize the United States at every turn. Wounded by his own fire due to carelessness was a clue to his ineptness. John Kerry is a nobody a scoundrel on par with past traitors – Benedict Arnold comes to mind.

Kerry’s term as Secretary of State was a failure, an insult to the United States as he bent over backwards to accommodate America’s enemies – the Iranians and Palestinians; Kerry always worked against America’s interests. Always in a state of delusion, mindless of his decisions; infiltrated by Muslims high on the Hookah. Kerry was addicted early in life to the “420” as it penetrated his thought process through the years.Cannabis

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo doubled down on his criticism of former Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday, accusing Kerry of “unseemly” contacts within Iran’s government.

Pompeo’s initial remarks on Friday followed a tweet from the president on Thursday, who called Kerry’s meetings with Zarif “illegal.”

“John Kerry had illegal meetings with the very hostile Iranian Regime, which can only serve to undercut our great work to the detriment of the American people. He told them to wait out the Trump Administration! Was he registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act? BAD!” President Trump wrote.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires those who represent the interests of foreign powers to disclose such relationships and any related activities and finances. Kerry said Wednesday on Fox News that he met with European and Iranian diplomats, but maintained that no negotiations were aimed at undermining the Trump administration’s policies. 

JAIL SWIFT BOAT KERRY before he does any more damage to the interests of the United States.

CLICK HERE FOR THE SWIFT BOAT CONTROVERSY -See the excerpt below. 

Some SBVT members have questioned the propriety of Kerry’s first Purple Heart, received for a wound sustained on December 2, 1968. Kerry remained on duty after being wounded, and sought treatment at the following day’s sick call. They assert that the injury was too minor to merit a citation because the only treatment Kerry received, after the removal of a piece of shrapnel from his arm, was bacitracin (an antibiotic) and a bandage, and he returned to service immediately. Other division members, including at least one SBVT member, received Purple Hearts under similar circumstances. SBVT also claims that the wound was not from enemy fire but was from shrapnel of a grenade he fired himself, “Self-inflicted wounds were awarded if incurred ‘in the heat of battle, and not involving gross negligence.’ Kerry’s critics insist his wound would not have qualified, but former Navy officials who worked in the service’s awards branch at the time said such awards were routine.”

YES, WE DO SPEAK ITALIAN

By VIVIENNE WALT

September 13, 2018

As evening fell on the town of Alzano lombardo in northern Italy one Sunday in early September, about 2,000 people crowded into a marquee tent. Anticipation grew as the announcer blared through a loudspeaker over the music, “Il capitano sta arrivando!”—The captain is coming!

Il capitano was Italy’s Matteo Salvini—the far-right Interior Minister whose rocketing rise over just six months has jolted Europe’s establishment and threatens to finally upturn a political system that has reeled under a populist surge for the past three years. When Salvini finally burst onto the stage after dark in jeans and his trademark green sneakers, the crowd was spellbound. For nearly two hours, a beer in one hand, he told the audience he would seize back control of their lives from the European Union’s faceless bureaucrats. “Italians first!” he shouted, to loud cheers.

Photograph by Marco P. Valli—Cesura

The Italian election in March delivered a humbling defeat to the country’s traditional parties and put Salvini in the position of kingmaker—he chose to ally his far-right party, the League, with the first-place finisher, anti-establishment Five Star Movement. The populist coalition represents a new era in this country’s famously fractious politics. Salvini grabbed the powerful job of Interior Minister, and is now responsible for Italy’s policing, national security and immigration policies. He is not Italy’s head of government—that job is held by the Five Star Movement’s Giuseppe Conte—but he doesn’t need to be. The parade of foreign dignitaries lining up to meet Salvini leaves little doubt about who calls the shots. Salvini is now seen as the closest thing Italy has to a chief executive.

Bannon told TIME by phone on Sept. 8, after meeting Salvini in Rome, that his new Brussels-based organization, called “The Movement,” aims to capture enough seats for right-wing populists in the European Parliament in next year’s elections to allow them—at the very least—to block any further efforts at E.U. integration; he calls it “command by negation.” To Salvini, it’s more elemental. “We are working to re-establish the European spirit that has been betrayed by those who govern this union,” he says. Slipping into the first-person pronoun, he adds: “It is clear I have to change the European dynamics.”

The populist wave in Europe has been building steadily over the past several years. Some believed it had crested with Britain’s vote to leave the E.U. in June 2016, especially after the globalist, pro-E.U. Emmanuel Macron defeated far-right leader Marine Le Pen last year to become President of France. But Europe’s right-wing nationalists have not vanished into obscurity. In Hungary, Denmark, Poland and more, they have quietly slipped into parliaments or won significant numbers of votes. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the official opposition party. Austria’s Freedom Party is now part of a coalition government. Even one of Europe’s most liberal countries, Sweden, isn’t immune—the far-right Sweden Democrats won a record 17.6% of votes on Sept. 9. In each case, the message is the same: stronger borders, drastically fewer migrants and a desire to take back control from the elites.

These politicians are not—for now—advocating following the U.K. out of the E.U.’s door. In fact, for Europe’s leaders, they are arguing for something perhaps more hazardous to integrated Europe—a radical ideological remake, including reining in open markets and open borders, and snatching back control from Brussels over key decisions like public spending. If they succeed, they will remake a continent. Few voices are louder in the movement than that of Matteo Salvini. “I choose to change things from within,” Salvini says. “That is more difficult and longer and more complicated. But it is a more concrete solution.”

Supporters of the then Northern League rally against an immigrant “invasion” in Milan in October 2014
Supporters of the then Northern League rally against an immigrant “invasion” in Milan in October 2014
Marco P. Valli—Cesura

Two days after his packed Alzano Lombardo rally, Salvini sinks into an armchair in his office inside the ornate Viminale Palace, which houses the Interior Ministry buildings in Rome. Tall, with a round face and scraggly beard, his boyish looks make him seem younger than his 45 years. He wears a red rubber wristband for his beloved AC Milan soccer team. But the green sneakers and beer are gone, replaced with the dark suit and crisp shirt of a politician in command.

When Salvini took over the party, then titled the Northern League, in 2013, it was virtually extinct and mired in financial corruption. Its popularity was confined to only a tiny minority of northern pro-autonomy supporters. As Europe began dealing with an unprecedented influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, Salvini sensed an opportunity, broadening the League’s message to encompass a trenchant nationalism (and in the process dropping the Northern from its name). He seized on Italians’ frustrations over their debt-laden economy, sluggish growth and a more than one-third youth unemployment rate, and minted a new slogan with Trumpian echoes: “Italians first.”

His message was impeccably timed. Years of government ineptitude had left both the mainstream right-wing, under Silvio Berlusconi, and the center-left, under Matteo Renzi, struggling for credibility. The rebels stormed into the vacuum. Although the bigger Five Star Movement finished first in elections in March, the League captured an unprecedented 17.4% share of the vote. In the six months since, polls suggest the party’s support has grown to almost a third of the electorate.

The driving force behind the League’s explosive growth has been immigration, still a hot-button issue in Europe after the collapse of Syria precipitated the biggest exodus since WW II. Ahead of the March election, Salvini put it at the center of his campaign. He made the wildly impracticable promise to deport 500,000 undocumented immigrants from Italy—roughly the total that have landed on Italian shores since 2015. The message for migrants lining up on the other side of the Mediterranean, Salvini said, was la pacchia è finita (“the party’s over”). That resonated with many Italians in the wake of the crisis. “We don’t have jobs for Italians, so it is difficult to give jobs to these people,” says Simona Pergreffi, a League -senator from Bergamo, who then makes clear her racial objection: “Not to mention, they want to impose their religion,” she says.

As is often the case with migration, the perception doesn’t reflect the reality. The flow of migrants across the Mediterranean has ebbed significantly since the peak of the crisis; from 1 million in 2015 to just 89,000 so far this year. A little over 18,000 arrived by sea to Italy, an 80% drop since the same period in 2017. In that context, experts say Salvini’s obsessional focus on migration doesn’t make a lot of sense. “He is a one-trick pony,” says Daniel Gros, director of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. “Yet the hysteria has increased.”

As Italy’s Interior Minister, Salvini now wants to suspend asylum procedures completely until the E.U. agrees on fair distribution of refugees, an issue that has deadlocked leaders in Brussels for years. He has incensed E.U. leaders by blocking NGO rescue boats from Italian ports—in August, he blocked a German-registered charity boat, the Aquarius, from disembarking 629 migrants it had rescued at sea; the vessel finally rerouted to Spain. Macron called Salvini’s action “nauseating.” Weeks later, Salvini refused to allow 144 migrants, mostly Africans, to disembark from an Italian coast-guard vessel in the Sicilian port of Catania. Only after a few days of furor did he allow women and children to leave the boat.

TOO LAZY TO DISTRIBUTE THE WATER – THIS IS NO SURPRISE

FROM THE

New York Post

 

Hundreds of thousands of water bottles meant for victims of Hurricane Maria are still sitting at a Puerto Rico airport — nearly a year after the deadly storm, according to a report.

A photo showing the bottles in boxes and covered in a blue tarp on a runway in Ceiba was shared widely on social media Tuesday evening.

“Although you don’t believe it… almost a million boxes of water that were never delivered to the villages,” posted Abdiel Santana, a photographer working for a Puerto Rican state police agency who took the pictures. “Is there anyone who can explain this?”

FEMA acknowledged to CBS News on Wednesday that the bottles were brought inland in 2017 in the wake of the hurricane and that they were turned over to “central government.”

It is unclear where the breakdown that caused the bottles to never be distributed was caused.

Celebrity chef José Andrés, who brought a crew of volunteers to help feed victims of Maria in the wake of the storm, called for an “official independent investigation” into what happened to the stash of drinking water.

“My teams knew about it but first they will say, ‘no we can not use them,’ months later water was no good for human consumption,” he tweeted. “We were ‘buying’ water because they wouldn’t give it to us.” He didn’t specify who “they” was.

The revelation comes as President Trump doubled down on his administration’s response to Hurricane Maria on Wednesday and lashed out at the mayor of San Juan, who has been a critic of the effort, as “incompetent.”

The president raised eyebrows Tuesday when he touted the response efforts in a meeting to go over preparations for the potentially devastating Hurricane Florence inching toward the Carolinas.

“The job that FEMA and law enforcement and everybody did, working along with the governor in Puerto Rico, I think was tremendous. I think that Puerto Rico was an incredible, unsung success,” he had said.

WHAT COLLUSION?

Pissed off by now “ ?  You should be! All sane heads realize that this Mueller investigation has one objectiveto bring down President Trump. Let’s look at “COLLUSION” – Defined as a secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose – acting in collusion with the enemy. So what does have to do with the campaign and election of Donald Trump?

How can you collude to tip an election in your favor? And who doesn’t collude to do this. But in the Trump case the question is what Russia could do to accomplish a Trump win, like maybe have “illegal aliens vote for him, stuff the ballot box, have dead voters pull the lever.” OMG we forgot to mention fake YouTube productions that conspired to bring Hillary down, and Facebook, what else can we say about bad actors discussing Trumps affairs, secret meetings with Russian co-conspirators. To us this seems more of what the Hillary Campaign did. And not one peep out of the FBI, no independent prosecutor either. But one thing did happen, much of the evidence to prove a conspiracy regarding collusion has been by the Hillary campaign. And we bet a great deal of this evidence has been sanitized, burned or wiped clean with a cloth. Where are those emails?

All of that non withstanding, Americans of the Red White and Blue stripe know full well that COLLUSION to win an election is all but impossible.

To do this voters would have to drink the Kool Aid Kool-Aid Drink Mix, 16 Flavors Variety Pack, 48 Packets (Kool Aid Party Variety 48 pk)en-mass. They sure did, but those who did are the ones who voted for Hillary. The real collusion was between the DNC and Clinton campaign who hired GPS Fusion to spread false information. But don’t forget the collusion involving Hillary and the breaking of Federal Law regarding her raiding PAC money. And that is not all, Hillary condoned the voting by illegal voters by helping them sign up to vote. Recently, 19 illegals have been caught in North Carolina. How about colluding with anti-Trump activists in the FBI, Strozk, Page, McCabe, Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein who did the Deep State Drilling for Hillary. 

LOCK HER UP, LOCK HER UP, LOCK HER UP NOW

“WE WILL NEVER FORGET THOSE WHO DIED ON 9-11”

NEVER FORGET THOSE WHO DIED ON 9-11-2001

A vicious ideology set the hijackers in motion. Their mission that seemed impossible a day before became reality on the morning of September 11, 2001. Not a person in America who was alive that day will ever forget those who perished. But we also must remember and be vigilant of those who live to carry on their mission. We know who they are. 

They have infiltrated our government, our schools, our neighborhoods.

In fact one was elected president of the United States. Their paradigm, a turtle philosophy of slow infiltration. Small towns and mega cities acquiesce to their demands; liberal judges affirm their requests. Look no further than London, Paris and Brussels. Sweden is another prime example of Muslim takeover.

Yes folks it is happening here, in Middle America and across the plains. Only you can stop this infiltration by standing tall against a credo of destruction. They will not be happy until America succumbs to the Caliphate.

God Bless those who perished on 9-11.

 

 

OBAMA THE LYING THIEVING CHIEF CRIMINAL TAKEN DOWN BY THE JUDGE

CLICK HERE FOR JUDGE JEANINE PIRRO WHO CALLED OUT OBAMA AND HIS LIES.

We all know that Obama is revolutionary criminal on the loose; every time he mouths off Trumps ratings improved. This Muslim Brotherhood ass licker can’t fool Patriotic Americans. The Judge lays Obama’s legacy out for all to see.  More than a flunky, he is guilty of treason and should be arrested before he does more damage to the glorious history of the United States. Still can’t get over that Donald J. Trump is the President HRC is not. Any cover up that happened is during the final year of Obama’s 2nd term. He commanded the “take down Trump operation from the get-go.

OUT FOR THE KILL

“The Donald” defeated a left wing progressive criminal in 2016; this lying “B” would be in jail now if it weren’t for the politicized FBI; a cover-up that makes Watergate look like a candy store heist. Any other person would be doing time and a lot of other things. But she is still mouthing off like nothing happened. Having the FBI, once a sacred institution, become an arm of a political party is pure unadulterated Treason. Trump won fair and square, they lost and now have suffer the consequences. However, this is not the case with a swarm of do nothing liberal progressive criminals. They will do anything, including murder, to stifle Trump and his agenda. Insiders loyal to Clinton crushed any evidence that would confirm here guilt. This was an independent agency of the U.S. government involved in a KGB scheme to protect one of their own. Remember the progressive agenda of Socialism is actually a true and tested autocratic dictatorship the likes of Marx, Lenin, Chavez and Castro.

The hearings go on and soon Kavanaugh will be sitting on the Supreme Court. This will be a milestone for the conservative movement. Since the court took a left turn with Earl Warren and continued on through Kennedy the social anarchists have basically gotten their way. Now, it is in our grasp to change the courts political philosophy. The ANTIFA crowd is out for the kill; they see their hedonistic political agenda taking a big time hit that will last for decades. They can’t get things done on the legislative side so they relied on the courts at every level to legislate from the bench.

Republicans let Obama’s two picks, Sotomayor and Kagan, slip right through – no protests from the conservatives. (from the Washington examinerDemocrats are upset about where the Supreme Court has been heading not because it isn’t doing its job, and not because it is overly partisan, but because they don’t like the fact that cases going there are increasingly being decided based on the Constitution and the law and not on motivated reasoning in search of liberals’ pet causes.

Any outside observer with a minimal intelligence knows full well that the FBI colluded with Hillary Campaign to bring down Trump from the get go. This inner coup started with the hiring of Fusion GPS.  SEE BELOW FOR PREVIOUS POSTS.

ANKLE BRACELETS WARRANTED

Finally, the truth has come out – how, when and why? We are not of the uninitiated, we are well informed, knowing full well a bald face lie from the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The guilty have been outed notwithstanding the Mueller investigation. By the way his investigation is a complete sham. He is a shill for Comey and company, protecting the guilty while harassing the innocent, therefore any indictments he brings or arrests he makes borders on collusion.

They have delved into areas that were never authorized, squeezed heads with far fetched codes, but they will never come clean on why they have failed to investigate the Russian colluding democrats under Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, the Podesta Group head honcho Tony Podesta, Fusion GPS, Wasserman-Schultz, Huma Abedin, etc.  For instances bringing a charge against Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI is a farce. His whole investigation is built on animosity against the Republicans and specifically Trump. But we must move on because the real criminals are escaping from the grasp of the law.

Back to Attorney General Sessions – yes he recused himself from the Russian investigation, not relevant to what has to come, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the power to arrest Hillary “jail the bird” Clinton, Wasserman-Schultz, Rice, Slick Willie, Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin, Loretta Lynch, Koskinen, Strozk, McCabe, Tony Podesta and any other number of lying, cheating, thieving players in this scam of scams.

The question we have regarding Sessions; has somebody threatened to chemically alter his manhood?

COMEY CAUGHT HOLDING THE SMOKING GUN – THEN PAGE AND STRZOK COVER UP THE CRIME

Fox News Channel logo.svg

The original script read like this,  “grossly negligent” when referring to Hillary Clinton’s crimes. Those pivotal words have a distinct legal meaning, and are drawn directly from a federal statute, 18 U.S.C. 793(f), which makes it a felony to handle classified documents in a “grossly negligent” manner. But what happened?

Under questioning, Comey admitted to the Inspector General Michael Horowitz that he authored the May 2 statement and penned every word of it himself. But then he offered the implausible claim that “he did not recall that his original draft used the term ‘gross negligence,’ and did not recall discussions about that issue.”

Metadata shows that on June 6, the FBI’s lead investigator on the case, Peter Strzok, sat down at his office computer to cleanse his boss’s statement of the vexing term, “gross negligence.”  With the help of his paramour and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, the words “extremely careless” were substituted to make Clinton appear less criminally culpable. Page told the IG that “to use a term that actually has a legal definition would be confusing.”

Strozk and Page also expunged from Comey’s statement his reference to another statute that Clinton had plainly violated. She should have been charged under the statute’s “intent” provisions.  With Comey’s consent and encouragement, the pair sanitized his findings of fact and contorted his conclusions of law. Clinton, who had not even been interviewed by the FBI yet, was free and clear. The investigation was a sham.

Comey may not have remembered writing the words that should have indicted Clinton, but he had complete recall of his inability to read the law. He told the IG he thought “Congress intended for there to be some level of willfulness present even to prove a ‘gross negligence’ violation.” If Comey had ever read the legislative history, he would have known that in 1948, Congress amended the original Espionage Act of 1917 to add a “gross negligence” provision that did not require intent or willfulness.

Just as Comey, Strzok, Page and company conspired to clear Hillary Clinton, they likewise concocted their “insurance policy,” a scam investigation of then-candidate Donald Trump. The FBI had no legal basis to initiate its investigation into Trump and his campaign. Facts were invented or exaggerated. Laws were perverted or ignored.  The law enforcers became the law breakers.  Comey’s scheme to leak pilfered presidential memos in order to trigger the appointment of his friend, Robert Mueller, as special counsel was a devious maneuver by an unscrupulous man. Comey’s insinuation that the president obstructed justice was another canard designed to inflame the liberal media.  Sure enough, they became his witting accessories.

Compare all of this – that there was never any credible evidence that Trump or his campaign collaborated with Russia to win the presidency – with the fact that there was ample evidence that Clinton had broken the law.

This is the story of “The Russia Hoax.”

HARRY REID – A CRIMINAL BY NO OTHER NAME – A VAIN ATTEMPT TO TAKE DOWN THE FREELY ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

To protect Hillary “lock her up” Clinton in the run for the White House FAKE information given to pugnacious Senator, “Harry Black Eye” Reid was the meal ticket utilized to sabotage the Trump run for the Presidency of the United States.  JOHN BRENNAN! Yes Brennan, under the head of the CIA under Obama told Reid not to release it, but did he?

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) sends a letter to then-FBI Director Comey voicing concern over Russian interference in the election and asking Comey to open an FBI investigation.

 – The Washington Times – Saturday, May 12, 2018

Then-Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid released a letter in the heat of the 2016 election alleging Trump-Russia collusion even though the CIA director at the time urged him not to, according to a person familiar with their conversation.

Mr. Reid’s Aug. 27 letter to the FBI appears to mark the first time a Democrat officially accused President’ Trump’s campaign of colluding with the Russian government to hack his party’s computers.

The letter has come to represent for conservatives the “deep state” — Obama loyalists leaking unproven allegations to the press against Mr. Trump and his people to ruin the campaign, the transition and the White House.

“The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount,” Mr. Reid wrote to FBI Director James B. Comey.

Mr. Reid wrote and leaked his letter after receiving a secret telephone briefing from then-CIA Director John Brennan.

The retired senator has portrayed the letter as having the blessing of Mr. Brennan, a fierce Trump critic who suggests the president is beholden to Russian President Vladimir Putin for fear of blackmail.

But now the Brennan side rebuts Mr. Reid’s contention that the then-CIA director was actively trying to leak damaging anti-Trump information during the election.

Nick Shapiro, former deputy chief of staff for Mr. Brennan as CIA director, told The Washington Times that his ex-boss considered the information sensitive. He expressly urged Mr. Reid to confine the information to private discussions with Mr. Comey.

That August, Mr. Brennan was briefing the so called “gang of eight” congressional leaders on Russian computer hacking and on suspicious that Trump people were involved.

Mr. Shapiro, now a Brennan adviser, provided this version of the Brennan-Reid phone call:

“Brennan used the same exact notes to brief Reid as he used with the other members of the Gang of Eight. In fact, most of the conversation was spent with Senator Reid telling Brennan what he had heard about Russians and the Trump campaign. Senator Reid informed Brennan that he was in the process of drafting a letter to Comey about his concerns. When Senator Reid asked Brennan whether he could reference this information in the letter to Comey, Brennan said ‘no,’ as the intelligence was being tightly controlled and he was worried that the letter would get out into the public. Brennan told him that Comey had been fully briefed on the intelligence and if he wanted to, it would be better to talk to him about it in a secure manner when he returned to D.C. instead of putting it in a letter.”

Mr. Reid, Nevada Democrat, wrote the letter anyway. And it was leaked to The New York Times and then migrated throughout the mainstream media.

It contained references to a Trump aide traveling to Moscow and allegedly meeting with two sanctioned Kremlin figures — an allegation contained in the Democratic Party-financed dossier written by ex-British spy Christopher Steele. The unnamed person is Carter Page, who has denied under oath he ever met the two people named by Mr. Steele.

The dossier at that point had not been published. The FBI possessed copies and had opened a counter-intelligence investigation into Russia meddling the previous month.

Mr. Reid’s version of his phone call from Mr. Brennan is contained in the best-selling book, “Russian Roulette,” which embraces the Trump-Russia conspiracy and promotes the Steele dossier.

The book says:

“Reid also had the impression that Brennan had an ulterior motive,” the authors said. “He concluded the CIA chief believed the public needed to know about the Russian operation, including the information about the possible links to the Trump campaign. When Reid later was asked if Brennan directly or indirectly had enlisted him to push information held by the intelligence community into the public realm, he told an interviewer, ‘Why do you think he called me?’ “

Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Brennan’s adviser, said that specific book excerpt is inaccurate. He also told The Times that rather than trying to sell Trump-Russia collusion during the campaign, the Obama White House and Mr. Brennan stayed silent.

The Washington Times submitted questions to Mr. Reid’s associates at a public policy institute in Nevada where he serves as co-chairman. The queries went unanswered.

Mr. Reid did not stop his drumbeat on Trump-Russia. After Mr. Steele leaked his dossier narrative to selected reporters in Washington, Yahoo News, whose Michael Isikoff co-authored “Russian Roulette,” wrote a story.

But The New York Times dampened the narrative with an Oct. 31 story headlined, “Investigating Donald Trump, FBISees No Clear Link to Russia.”

Mr. Reid was furious

Adam Jentleson, his deputy chief of staff, tweeted, “I’ll say it: NYT interviewed Reid for this story. He said things contrary to the story. NYT discarded the interview.”

“Maybe some want to know why the NYT seemed to cover for Comey’s FBI? Maybe even some at the NYT? Maybe not? I’m just asking questions,” Jentleson said. The New York Times would go on to become one of journalism’s chief proponents of Trump-Russia collusion.

The Washington Times has examined Mr. Steele’s series of collusion charges and found that none has been confirmed independently and publicly at this point. Special counsel Robert Mueller continues to investigate.

However, the FBI’s investigation remained a secret during the campaign. Despite public pressure, including public letters from then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid on August 29 and October 30, 2016, the latter claiming that the FBI was concealing “explosive information about close ties and coordination between Trump and his top advisers, and the Russian government,” the FBI did not disclose its investigation until after the election. In fact, on October 31, 2016, The New York Times reported that FBI officials had not found evidence demonstrating links between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
David Kris is a founder of Culper Partners LLC. He previously served as assistant attorney general for national security, associate deputy attorney general, trial attorney at the Department of Justice, general counsel at Intellectual Ventures, and deputy general counsel and chief ethics and compliance officer at Time Warner. He is the author or co-author of several works on national security, including the treatise National Security Investigations and Prosecutions, and has taught at Georgetown University and the University of Washington.

The Carter Page FISAs are out via the Freedom of Information Act. Here are a few observations, relatively brief but still just a bit too long for Twitter.

First, a huge amount of information is redacted in these FISA applications, but they still represent a monumental disclosure to the public. The government considers FISA applications to be very sensitive—and their disclosure, even heavily redacted, may have long-term, programmatic consequences long after we’re finished with President Trump. The government seems to have accepted that FOIA applies to FISA. Without taking a position on the issue it made me recall this Lawfare post that argues to the contrary.

Second, for those who don’t remember, the controversy about these FISA applications first arose in February when House intelligence committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes released a memo claiming that the FBI misled the FISA Court about Christopher Steele, the former British secret agent who compiled the “dossier” on Trump-Russia ties and who was a source of information in the FISA applications on Page. The main complaint in the Nunes memo was that FBI whitewashed Steele—that the FISA applications did not “disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials.”

In response to the Nunes memo, the Democrats on the committee released their own memo. That memo quoted from parts of the FISA applications, including a footnote in which the FBI explained that Steele was hired to “conduct research regarding Candidate #1,” Donald Trump, and Trump’s “ties to Russia,” and that the man who hired him was “likely looking for information that could be used to discredit [Trump’s] campaign.”

Based on this back and forth between the HPSCI partisans, I wrote on Lawfare at the time that the FBI’s disclosures on Steele “amply satisfie[d] the requirements” for FISA applications, and that the central irony of the Nunes memo was that it “tried to deceive the American people in precisely the same way that it falsely accused the FBI of deceiving the FISA Court.” The Nunes memo accused the FBI of dishonesty in failing to disclose information about Steele, but in fact the Nunes memo itself was dishonest in failing to disclose what the FBI disclosed. I said then, and I still believe, that the “Nunes memo was dishonest. And if it is allowed to stand, we risk significant collateral damage to essential elements of our democracy.”

Now we have some additional information in the form of the redacted FISA applications themselves, and the Nunes memo looks even worse. In my earlier post, I observed that the FBI’s disclosures about Steele were contained in a footnote, but argued that this did not detract from their sufficiency: “As someone who has read and approved many FISA applications and dealt extensively with the FISA Court, I will anticipate and reject a claim that the disclosure was somehow insufficient because it appeared in a footnote; in my experience, the court reads the footnotes.” Now we can see that the footnote disclosing Steele’s possible bias takes up more than a full page in the applications, so there is literally no way the FISA Court could have missed it. The FBI gave the court enough information to evaluate Steele’s credibility.

There’s also more detail on the previous disclosure from the House intelligence committee Democrats’ memo on how Steele went to the press with the “dossier” when FBI Director James Comey sent his October 2016 letter to Congress disclosing the possible newfound importance of the Weiner laptop in the Clinton investigation. According to the FISA applications, Steele complained that Comey’s action could influence the election. But when Steele went to the press, it caused FBI to close him out as an informant—facts which are disclosed and cross-referenced in the footnote in bold text.

While I am sure people will try, my initial impression is that with all the redactions it is going to be very tough to figure out the full scope of information supporting the Court’s repeated finding of probable cause to believe that Carter Page was an agent of Russia. There is a mention of two Russians, one of whom pleaded guilty to being an unregistered agent of a foreign government and was sentenced to 30 months, but even that is disconnected from the redacted discussion that precedes it. Substantively, the government seems to have hewed as closely to the prior disclosures as it could in applying FOIA.

But it is worth noting that—and as the Democrats previously pointed out—the judges who signed off on these four FISA applications were all appointed by Republican presidents, including one George H.W. Bush appointee (Anne Conway), two George W. Bush appointees (Rosemary Collyer and Michael Mosman) and one Reagan appointee (Raymond Dearie). I know some of those judges, and they certainly are not the types to let partisan politics affect their legal judgments.

This illusion to the Republican appointed judges is in fact not telling the whole story because,  the FISA applications did not “disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials.”

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