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Location: Iowa, how long can this be? Does it really ruin the left column spacing?
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Feb 2, 2018, 04:13 PM
John McCain:
“In 2016, the Russian government engaged in an elaborate plot to interfere in an American election and undermine our democracy. Russia employed the same tactics it has used to influence elections around the world, from France and Germany to Ukraine, Montenegro, and beyond. Putin’s regime launched cyberattacks and spread disinformation with the goal of sowing chaos and weakening faith in our institutions. And while we have no evidence that these efforts affected the outcome of our election, I fear they succeeded in fueling political discord and dividing us from one another.
“The latest attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice serve no American interests – no party’s, no president’s, only Putin’s. The American people deserve to know all of the facts surrounding Russia’s ongoing efforts to subvert our democracy, which is why Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation must proceed unimpeded. Our nation’s elected officials, including the president, must stop looking at this investigation through the warped lens of politics and manufacturing partisan sideshows. If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s job for him.”
I suppose the obvious question is what happened in the background while everyone was flipping their shit about this?
Trump not enforcing the sanctions on Russia that were nearly unanimously passed by congress?
If you're inferring this was a purposeful distraction, this administration doe snot have the guile to do it.
My understanding about the IC objections, thus far, is thanks to the memo, Russia can now pin down the dates Page was under surveillance, which gives them a great idea about what we may know. There was no good reason to reveal that.
“If Papadopoulos was such a major figure, you had nothing on him, you know, the guy lied,” Nunes told “Fox & Friends.” “As far as we can tell, Papadopoulos never even knew who — never even had met with the president.”
Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, attended a breakfast meeting in January that Michael Flynn, then the incoming national security adviser, and Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, also attended.
The breakfast event, held on Wednesday, January 18, was closed to the press, and it is still unclear what exactly was discussed.
The Washington correspondent for the Turkish newspaper Daily Sabah, which tends to be pro-government, reported at the time that an aide to Cavusoglu said he "was the only foreign leader at the breakfast and the topics on the US-Turkish agenda were discussed by the attendees."
Considering Flynn was involved in some super-shady stuff regarding the Turks, Nunes could be involved as well.
House Intel releases transcript of Monday's meeting, in which they voted to release the Dems' rebuttal to Nunes' memo. http://docs.house.gov/meetings/IG/IG...t-20180205.pdf …
Schiff says Nunes "violated Committee rules by initiating an investigation of the FBI and DOJ without consulting with the Minority."
Nunes has gone really rogue. He's now 'investigating' the FBI and DOJ.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, a relentless critic of the media, has found a way around the often unflattering coverage of his role in the Trump-Russia investigation — by operating his own partisan news outlet.
Resembling a local, conservative news site, “The California Republican” is classified on Facebook as a “media/news company” and claims to deliver “the best of US, California, and Central Valley news, sports, and analysis.”
But the website is paid for by Nunes’ campaign committee, according to small print at the bottom of the site. Leading the home page most recently: a photograph of Nunes over the headline, “Understanding the process behind #ReleaseTheMemo.”
Asked for comment about “The California Republican” website, Anthony Ratekin, Nunes’ chief of staff, said in an email Saturday: “Until Politico retracts its multitude of fake stories on Congressman Nunes, we will not go on the record.”
I believe it's been down since Politico revealed it.
“I don’t have any clue who George Nader is,” admits Representative Mike Conaway. The House of Representatives has 435 members, many of them quite ill-informed, so it comes as no shock that a member would admit a total lack of familiarity with a man featured in two A1 stories in the New York Times.
He then ran down away from the reporter with his fingers in his ears yelling "I can't hear you! I can't hear you!"
Asked about the articles of impeachment, Rosenstein quipped, “they can’t even resist leaking their own drafts,” and then compared the document to one the Justice Department seeks in charging someone with a crime.
“We have to affix our signature to the charging document,” he said, adding later, “I just don’t have anything to say about documents like that, that nobody has the courage to put their name on, and that they leak in that way.”
A former federal law enforcement official familiar with the department’s views said that Mr. Rosenstein and top F.B.I. officials have come to suspect that some lawmakers were using their oversight authority to gain intelligence about that investigation so that it could be shared with the White House.
After the United States agreed to sell Ukraine some weapons, the Ukrainian government halted all cooperation with Robert Mueller’s probe. (Ukraine had previously supplied investigators with important evidence, like incriminating details of Paul Manafort’s secret payments from a Russian-backed party.) The weapons sale was the stated reason for this turnabout. I suggested the weapons sale might have been, at least in part, a bribe intended to induce Ukraine to withhold cooperation from Mueller.
Alternatively, Ukraine decided not to piss off Trump because he can **** them over. No request needed when you fear the dude.
So, Nunes called-in to Fox News today and declared that he was going to push to have Sessions declared in-contempt of Congress.
The only thing that's left that we can do is we have to move quickly to hold the attorney general of the United States in contempt and that's what I'm going to press for this week.
We've asked for very important information, it's still classified. Because of the way they conducted this information, most of this information is classified. But because this is so important, I'm not going to take any excuse to say, “Oh we're harming national security.”
However, according to a report from CNN, Nunes “opted not to read” the unopened folder of documents that was presented to him and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) at the Department of Justice.
Ingraham confronted him about the report.
“Now you’re getting slammed in response by CNN and now others that you asked for these documents and then you, Devin Nunes, have a staffer read them. You don’t read them. So how serious are you?” Ingraham asked. “You just want to help the president. You’re not even reading the documents. What about that CNN report that came out today?”
That's right, Nunes isn't reading what he's subpoena'd.
That's right, Nunes isn't reading what he's subpoena'd.
Well, Nunes is quite full of it, and you'd hope that fellow Republicans reign him in a little. If you are always that low on substance, it'll eventually come back to bite you and your fellow party members.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
The stakes are so high that the FBI has been working over the past two weeks to mitigate the potential damage if the source’s identity is revealed, according to several people familiar with the matter. The bureau is taking steps to protect other live investigations that the person has worked on and is trying to lessen any danger to associates if the informant’s identity becomes known, said these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence operations.
“The day that we can’t protect human sources is the day the American people start becoming less safe,” Wray said. “Human sources in particular who put themselves at great risk to work with us and with our foreign partners have to be able to trust that we’re going to protect their identities and in many cases their lives and the lives of their families.”
The source is a U.S. citizen who has provided information over the years to both the FBI and the CIA, as The Post previously reported, and aided the Russia investigation both before and after Mueller’s appointment in May 2017, according to people familiar with his activities.
Nothing more patriotic than burning an FBI asset to try and take the heat off a President of questionable integrity.
Trump’s allies believe outing the source and revealing details about his or her work for the FBI could help them challenge the investigation and, potentially, provide cause for removing Mueller or his overseer, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.
Nunes, meanwhile, has purposefully not been talking to Trump, to avoid accusations that he is providing sensitive information to the president, according to these people. Instead, Nunes has been relaying the status of his battle with the Justice Department to White House Counsel Donald McGahn.
Yeah, he couldn't possibly get information to the President through the WH counsel. Absurd!
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) has told the president on several occasions that he should stop talking about the Russia probe, according to an official familiar with their conversations. “You’re not guilty, don’t act like it,” Ryan would say, and Trump would agree, but then the president would go right back to venting about the investigation, according to this official.
On Tuesday, DOJ offered to brief Nunes and Gowdy once again with understanding that questions remained outstanding from last week. Top officials were prepared to meet with the two lawmakers TODAY and answer questions, but their invitation went unanswered.
NEWS: White House says meeting between DOJ and lawmakers will be Thursday. Reps. NUNES, GOWDY, FBI Director Wray, DNI Coats and DOJ's Ed O'CALLAHAN. No White House officials.
Schiff got into the first meeting in place of Pelosi.
However, Trumps WH lawyer, Emmet Flood was spotted there with Kelly. That's way worse than Kelly. Underscores why DOJ shouldn't have made this concession in the first place.
RUDY tells @dsamuelsohn that today’s briefing will inform Trump’s legal defense:
“We want to see how the briefing went to today and how much we learned from it. If we learned a good deal from it, it will shorten that whole process considerably.”
Exactly what Dems feared.
How can a classified briefing affect Trump's legal defense? It's classified.
Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s attorneys, told The Associated Press on Friday that the White House hopes to get a readout of the information next week, particularly about the use of a longtime government informant who approached members of Trump’s campaign in a possible bid to glean intelligence on Russian efforts to sway the election. Trump has made unproven claims of FBI misconduct and political bias and has denounced the asset as “a spy.”
Since when do prosecutors give attorneys privileged information like this? This strikes me as something you litigate if it were to go to trial, after the info is properly disclosed in discovery.
ALERT: Rep. Goodlatte is right now threatening to hold an FBI agent in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about a pending counterintelligence investigation when the agent has been specifically instructed by the FBI not to answer such questions.
A little later, Strozk asked if he could confer with his lawyer and Goodlette said he was only allowed to confer with his lawyer, not the FBI one. He subsequently capitulated because it didn't make any ****ing sense.