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Grassley-Graham memo confirms allegations in Nunes memo

Working for the Democratic Party: A careful analysis of the Grassley-Graham memo [pdf], released this week as a follow-up to the Nunes memo released last week, has found that it confirms the allegations of the first, and adds a few more.

More important, it clearly shows that the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Obama administration, and possibly the FISA court itself, abused their power to go after their political opponents.

The Obama Justice Department and FBI used anonymously sourced, Clinton-campaign generated innuendo to convince the FISA court to issue surveillance warrants against Carter Page, and in doing so, they concealed the Clinton campaign’s role. Though the Trump campaign had cut ties with Page shortly before the first warrant was issued in October 2016, the warrant application was based on wild allegations of a corrupt conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Moreover, the warrant meant the FBI could seize not only Page’s forward-going communications but any past emails and texts he may have stored — i.e., his Trump campaign communications.

With its verification by the Grassley-Graham memo, the Nunes memo now has about a thousand times more corroboration than the Steele dossier, the basis of the heinous allegations used by the Justice Department and FBI to get the FISA warrants.

What the Grassley-Graham memo tells us is that the Nunes memo, for all the hysteria about it, was tame. The Grassley-Graham memo tells us that we need not only a full-blown investigation of what possessed the Obama administration to submit such shoddy applications to the FISA court, but of how a judge — or perhaps as many as four judges — rationalized signing the warrants.

We need full disclosure — the warrants, the applications, the court proceedings. No more games.

Read it all. It is damning, and shows that the FBI was out to get Trump, with the approval of White House, the Justice Department, and the FISA court. They had no evidence, they knew they had no evidence, but they got a warrant anyway, and got it renewed repeatedly, allowing them to spy on the Trump campaign as well as later after he took office.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

19 comments

  • Cotour

    I think a very interesting question to be asked is: Was Carter Page essentially an agent / operative of the FBI and sent by the FBI into the Trump campaign in order to gain FISA warrant access to it?

    If true, was it done with the knowledge of all concerned or was Page just set up and knew nothing about it?

    Because when you watch a Carter Page interview you get a very suspicious feeling about what I have previously termed his “squirrilyness” in how he answers questions. Stay tuned on this issue.

  • ken anthony

    I will be furious if people aren’t held accountable.

  • Desm

    A quick summary of what actually happened during the election
    1. Russia hacked Trumps opponents private email to influence election

    2. Trump used that hacked info during his campaign

    3. Trump team had meetings with Russians explicitly about dirt on Hillary

    4. They lied about those meetings repeatedly.

    5. The FBI’s only public action during campaign actually targeted Hillary, not these actions by Trumpworld.

  • Cotour

    A different and more accurate through evidence summary based more on facts that actually happened during the election.

    1. Seth Rich downloads the DNC email file to a thumb drive and sends it to Wikileaks and Wikileaks releases it to the public. How is that known? The recorded down load speed of the information, it happened too quickly to have been accomplished by a hack.

    2. Wikileaks releasing the information, that no one in the DNC denied is accurate, gave the general public a realistic view into the Hillary presidential election machine and the accompanying treachery.

    3. The Trump team was interested in verifiable dirt on Hillary and met with a Russian lawyer looking to discuss the Misvisky act related to adoptions. When it was understood that it was either a bust or a set up they abandoned the meeting.

    4. They were not as truthful about the meeting because they came to understand that they may have some how shot themselves in the foot.

    5. James Comey who was put in the position by the Bill Clinton / Tarmac meeting Attorney General Loretta Lynch of essentially becoming the default Attorney General made a 13 minute speech telling the entire population of America why he was going to have to indict Hillary Clinton for what what a clear violation of her security clearance miraculously does the exact opposite.

    6. It has been further established that high level individuals in the leadership of both the FBI and the DOJ have conspired through lies and manipulations to ensure that Hillary would be unencumbered in her qwest to be crowned the “First Female president”, her birth right. This is further established by evidence in the fact that many both in the FBI and the DOJ leadership have either been fired, have been demoted or have quit. And many are sure to be indicted and may well serve prison sentences for their actions.

    7. Robert Mueller who was appointed by Rod Rosenstein, who are both up to their eyeballs in Russian conspiracy, which they did not notify Congress on at the time, via the Uranium One pay for play Hillary Clinton shake down ($143 million, how ever much it is now, I lose track) who apparently by the growing mountain of evidence basically sold 20 percent of Americas uranium supplies to Russia. (Does anyone that hears that ever think that the idea to sell those resources to an adversary was a good idea? Hello, anyone? You DESM? You think thats a good idea?)

    I could go on but again, I do not want to write a book.

  • Desm: Your summary is interesting in that it reveals that you haven’t bothered to read anything in detail about this story, as it has unfolded. You might have watched a lot of cable news, probably MSNBC, but you have not read anything of depth. For example, you clearly did not read the story I linked to.

    To comment with so little knowledge only embarrasses you. You should try harder.

  • Cotour

    Democrat
    Espousing
    Silly
    Memes

    ?

  • Cotour

    Democrat
    Encouraging
    Sedition
    Moronically

    ?

  • wodun

    You left some things out Des.

    – There is no evidence Russia hacked the DNC

    – Podesta fell for a phishing email that told him to reset his password and even though IT told him it was a scam, he used the link in the email to reset his password. We don’t know for sure who was behind the low tech effort.

    – Russia helped organize at least one protest where thousands of Democrats showed up and also tried to organize one for a perceived Republican cause where less than ten people showed up.

    – Russia has helped organize and fund Democrat activism for almost a hundred years.

    – All of the Democrat’s policies favor Russia while none of Trump’s do.

    – Democrats celebrate Wikileaks, Manning, and Snowden as heroes

    – Russia bought ads that supported Democrat and Republican causes but the ad buys were very small.

    – Twitter released examples of Russian meddling and they were all just memes.

    – Hillary, the DNC, and the Obama administration worked with a British spy to get information from Russian agents to smear Trump.

    – The vehicle for the Democrats Russian collusion is a company that lobbies on behalf of the Russian government.

    – Adam Schiff tried to get naked pictures of Trump from foreign agents he thought had connections in Russia

    – Senator Mark Warner tried to set up a meeting with Christopher Steele by going through Russian oligarchs and Lavrov

    – The dossier was used as the primary evidence used to get FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign

    – Campaign finance laws were broken when Hillary and the DNC funded Fusion GPS working with the Russians to create the dossier.

    – The dossier was being used by the DNC media during the campaign prior to it being released by Buzzfeed.

    – Democrat operatives in the media were willing accomplices in the creation and dissemination of the dossier and are still working on the effort.

    – Emails and text messages show that the investigation into Hillary Clinton was rigged.

    – The same officials who rigged the Hillary investigation were placed in charge of investigating Trump.

    – There is also the issue of unmasking which has not been fully explored yet.

  • wodun

    To refute your points specifically:

    1) Russia targeted both campaigns for meddling.

    2) Trump didn’t “use” the emails from wikileaks so much as the public was allowed to read them. The damage came from what the emails contained, regardless of what Trump did or didn’t do talking about them.

    The emails showed that Hillary and the Democrats rigged the Democrat primary and that Hillary cheated during the debates. This emphasizes the pattern of corruption we see in Obama’s FBI and the DNC media.

    3) The people who set up the meeting with Trump Jr were working with the Democrat party at the time and were the ones who wrote the dossier.

    The other meetings were just normal incidental contact that don’t support the Democrat’s conspiracy theory.

    4) Its true that the Trump admin didn’t come clean immediately about Donald Jr’s meeting with the DNC’s Russian partners.

    5) The FBI’s actions shielded and protected Hillary while at the same time they had a covert operation to spy on the Trump campaign and spread disinformation in the media about Trump colluding with Russia.

  • wodun

    There is a big unknown here. What did the spying on Page and Popadopoulos produce? Two small campaign staffers with limited contact to higher ups wouldn’t garner much in the way of direct surveillance unless they were used as justification for spying on other people in the campaign.

    There has to be more here than just using these two people to support the conspiracy theory that Trump worked with the Russians to hack the DNC and go phishing with Podesta. None of the leaks about what was obtained spying on them support the notion that there was any collusion, especially collusion on the wikileaks stuff which was the impetus for the current investigation.

  • Cotour

    An interesting listen and tutorial about the net phenomenon “Q” and what has and will be going on in the world.

    https://youtu.be/QmODQZx1Ry0

    DESM, if a human, and any other concerned human, might listen to it,its quite interesting.

  • wayne

    It was the incidental collection they were after.

  • desm

    Bob, you have called collusion accusations a “nothing burger”in the past. You have no concern over the points I mention? There has been a sustained attempt by you to paint the FBI as politically motivated. The fact is that the FBI did intervene in the last election by publicly reopening the email investigation then closing it mere days before the election. Concurrently they were investigating the Trump campaign and kept that quiet, why not announce both at the same time?

  • desm: I have watched closely the many and endless accusations of collusion by the Trump campaign with the Russians, and have found there to be absolutely nothing there. I’m sorry, but that’s what I see: no evidence. It also is illogical, and does not match the personality, background, and policy of Trump, both before he was president, and since his election.

    If you read this website, you know that I don’t play parties here. I don’t care what party anyone belongs to. What I care about is freedom, the Constitution, the rule of law, and justice. Right now, the bulk of the corruption I see is coming from the Democrats and the FBI, working to misuse the power of government to attack a duly elected president.

    As I say, that you apparently don’t want to see this indicates a partisan unwillingness on your part to face the corruption from the Democratic Party.

  • Andrew_W

    Yes Bob, those that are the most partisan can never see their partisanship, to them the truth is clear and rationalizing and confirmation bias does the rest, coverage that doesn’t fit what they want to believe is expunged from their minds.

    I’ve watched several eminent psychologists discussing exactly that evolution-developed human trait recently.

  • Cotour

    The Russian “collusion”, like the thinking that it is being put forth that the entire FBI is corrupt are similar, these are really both a false equivalencies created in the minds of the public by the media and the some of the general public is unable to discern the difference and lumps it all together.

    While the Russians are for ever in an on going psyops / propaganda mode against the U.S., especially with the introduction of the internet, there has been no evidence known to me that says that Donald Trump communicated with the Russians / Putin and made some sort of quid pro quo deal that benefited them before or after he became president. The investigation that is on going and promoted by Congress and the Senate appears to be focused more on the actions that the Russians took related to either hacking voting machines or other election related disruptions via the internet. They do it every day, we do it every day. To mix the two kinds of actions is to create the false equivalency.

    And the FBI and its leadership (Not the rank and file, although a lawyer I know says that the FBI as a rule can be very mercenary and ruthless if they are trying to pressure you for a result) are not the focus of the plain to see corruption and apparent collusion that has through evidence gone on within the LEADERSHIP of the FBI and the DOJ. Through evidence. Another false equivalency mashed up together and confuses many.

    Another point, Trump can not “collude” while exercising his powers as the president of the United States. Trumps OPINION about Russian sanctions may be different that the previous president, so his different actions related to Russia is not collusion but changing policy as per his powers granted to him under the Constitution. (If in fact the policy has changed)

    Did Obama “collude” with Russia when he said “Tell Vlad that I will be more flexible after I am reelected” ? Was that related to standing down American nukes? Or was it related to getting that Uranium One deal squared away?

  • Cotour

    Just the other day I had to explain to a Liberal the who came at me with: What about Rob Porter and domestic violence and Kelly not firing him and shouldn’t Kelly now resign? And she balanced it against whether the FBI / DOJ corruption and collusion to pervert an election, basically comparing them and asking which was more important? A total insane thinking process.

    Basically what she was saying to me was that because Rob Porter was apparently violent in his private life and that Kelly did not fire him a month ago that Kelly and Trump by extension should just resign and lets get someone “Normal” as the president.

    I had to prepare this email to explain it to her.

    It is False Equivalency that is many times woven into the media narrative as apart of the political warfare and counter argument that goes on.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

    While each issue has its own importance, in the media this is used opposed to each other to imply they are both equal, and the featured counter issue / argument is just as important and so neutralizes what may be a bigger and more important issue.

    Both issues are important. Violence against women is an important issue, and identifying corruption and abuse of power at the highest levels of law enforcement against the people of the United States is also an important issue.

    Each subject or issue stands alone and must be dealt with objectively / individually as their gravitas or importance requires. False equivalency creates a Subjective element and turns things emotional when these issues are to be solved Objectively.

  • Cotour

    Here is what I find fairly reasonable in describing what is on going in our politics from National Review.

    http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456354/fisa-scandal-clinton-obama-corruption-lawbreaking-whats-next-prosecution

    Partisan? Hyper partisan? Facts and evidence are facts and evidence, we can have some flexibility in how we interpret them by attempting to assume someones intent in the context of the actions, but then we are still left with the facts and evidence.

    Who needs “eminent psychologists” to tell them that people are partisan to some degree? I do not, and still, we are left with facts and evidence.

  • Edward

    wodun wrote: “– There is no evidence Russia hacked the DNC

    Indeed. The publisher of the hacked emails, Wikileaks, said that the emails came from a disgruntled Sanders supporter, which is supported by the content of those emails. As wodun later pointed out: “The emails showed that Hillary and the Democrats rigged the Democrat primary and that Hillary cheated during the debates. This emphasizes the pattern of corruption we see in Obama’s FBI and the DNC media.” Every Sanders supporter should be angry that Sanders was cheated out of a fair primary run, and one supporter did something about it.

    Unfortunately, the DNC and Clinton are using the hack against Trump rather than the world using it against the corrupt DNC. And that corruption has infected the federal government.

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