The Hill’s John Solomon has just posted a detailed article headlined Nellie Ohr’s ‘Hi Honey’ emails to DOJ about Russia collusion should alarm us all.

Solomon’s article reveals that Nellie, working as a contractor for Fusion GPS, did “research” which she sent to her husband Bruce, the number 4 person at the US Department of Justice at the time.  She also evidently sent the same information to Bruce’s colleagues.

The problem is that in testifying (or maybe “testilying”) before Congress, Nellie invoked marital privilege in declining to reveal the colleague communications.

It is likely that Congress will now send the New and Improved FBI a referral requesting it initiate an investigation into Nellie’s possible perjury in Congressional testimony.

Whoa, Nellie!

(John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. )

John Solomon, a very reputable journalist and columnist for The Hill website, has been digging into Ukraine’s interference in the 2016 general election in the United States.  Specifically, Solomon has been looking at allegations by Ukraine’s National  Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) that the Ukraine government provided Hillary Clinton’s campaign with information about Paul Manafort’s business dealings in Ukraine.  Information about Manafort’s Ukraine deals was relevant in the 2016 US presidential election because of Manafort’s known association with then Republican nominee Donald J. Trump.

In my OpenCdA post on April 7, 2019, I linked to Solomon’s article headlined Ukrainian to US prosecutors:  Why don’t you want our evidence on Democrats?  That article raised an allegation supported by documentary evidence that US Department of Justice prosecutors only wanted evidence against Paul Manafort.  The same authorities rejected receiving information connecting Hunter Biden, son of then-Vice President and now announced 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden, to a money laundering scheme.  Solomon’s article said:

Financial records showing a Ukrainian natural gas company routed more than $3 million to American accounts tied to Hunter Biden, younger son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, who managed U.S.-Ukraine relations for the Obama administration. Biden’s son served on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings.

On April 25, 2019, Solomon published another related article on The Hill website.  Its headline is How the Obama White House engaged Ukraine to give Russia collusion narrative an early boost.  This latest article adds more details about the evidence and supporting the assertions that (1) Ukraine provided information about Manafort to the USDoJ with the specific intent of helping Hillary Clinton win the 2016 presidential election, and (2) that Vice President Joe Biden intervened with the Ukraine government in March 2016 to get Ukraine’s Chief Prosecutor fired.  That Chief Prosecutor had sought to interview Hunter Biden about the money he was receiving from inside the Ukraine while he was sitting on the board of Burisma Holdings.

Ukraine officials are seeking a meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr to provide him with the evidence they have about Ukraine interference in the 2016 US presidential election and about payments made to 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, by the Ukrainian government.

This set of facts makes even more important the reports of the DoJ Inspector General and the investigation supposedly being conducted by US Attorney John Huber.   Whereas the Mueller non-investigation investigation was intentionally limited to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the IG and Huber investigations have a much broader scope of investigation into criminal conduct by US officials before, during, and after the 2016 election.

If the Russians were genuinely interested in recruiting Donald Trump or any member of his family to be an agent to spy clandestinely, long-term, for its foreign and military intelligence services, the FSV RF and the GRU, would they (meaning Putin) send a Russian national lawyer (Natalia Veselnitskaya) with direct ties to the Russian government into overt meetings with potential targets for recruitment in the Trump Tower?

If the government of the People’s Republic of China were genuinely interested in spying on President Donald Trump or anything going on at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s private club in Florida, would the PRC’s intelligence service, the MSS, have sent a readily-recognizable Chinese national woman (Yujing Zhang)  with poor English language skills and an array of technical equipment, covert communications, and malware to try and talk her way through staff and Secret Service checkpoints with poorly prepared and very shaky multiple cover stories?

The answer to both these questions is a resounding “No!”

And yet, the Fools on the Hill (members of Congress) and their go-to stooge, Robert Mueller III, have just spent the last 2-1/2 years and tens of millions of dollars trying to show that President Donald J. Trump and his presidency have been fatally contaminated by exactly these kinds of foreign influence operations.

If the very few honest and competent Senators and Representatives among the Fools on the Hill Club dig deeper, what they are likely to find is that both the Russians and the ChiComs have been running what is often referred to as “discoverable influence operations” (or discoverable intelligence operations) in the US.  I’m quite certain this possibility occurred to or was explained to them long before now, though judging from their actions, you might reasonably ask if they were listening to the explanation.  The key word is “discoverable.”

Most covert or clandestine intel operations run in other countries are intended to remain hidden from the counterintelligence services of the host country and the target country.  Learning that your successfully recruited spy has been discovered is the next-to-last thing either a case officer  or the espionage agent want.  (Only more disturbing to the case officer or spy would be having the spy discovered by counterintelligence and the CO or spy does not know about it!)

For example, Robert Philip Hanssen is a former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent who spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence services against the United States from 1979 to 2001.   The KGB (later the FSV) and Hanssen used proper tradecraft to keep his identity and espionage activities secret from the FBI and others in the US counterintel community for as long as they could.   Hanssen and the FSV hoped he would never be discovered.    Once he was discovered, Hanssen was of no further use to the FSV.  He became a throwaway and will die in prison.

In contrast with “normal” human intelligence operations like Hanssen, discoverable influence/intelligence operations are expected to be discovered by host country counterintelligence.  In fact, they’re designed to be discovered.  Their discovery is part of the aggressor intelligence service’s operation strategy.

The host and target countries’ counterintelligence discovery of the operation, the methods used to discover or failure to discover it, and the amount of time it took for the countries to discover and correctly assess it provides the aggressor’s intelligence services with useful information about the skills, capabilities, and limitations of opposing counterintelligence services.

How we have responded and continue to respond to the absurd charges of “Russian collusion” against candidate, nominee, and now-President Trump has provided foreign intelligence services with valuable information about the United States intelligence and counterintelligence services’ own capabilities and limitations.    It has also further revealed more of our own social, political, and economic vulnerabilities.

I just finished watching Attorney General William Barr’s press conference in which he officially releases the public version of the Mueller report.

If you didn’t watch the entire press conference that lasted just under 24 minutes, here is a link to it.  The press conferences begins at 18:50.  After his prepared remarks, AG Barr took questions from the skews media.  He left the podium at 42:05.

My observations:

–It’s reassuring to finally have a real Attorney General in charge of the Department of Justice, an AG that understands the duties of that department and the potential for abuses by people employed in it.

–Most of the press corps demonstrated by their conduct and many of their questions that they are profoundly ignorant and lacking in sufficient subject matter knowledge to be reporting on the Justice Department.    Though they had not yet seen the redacted public version of the Mueller report, they were clearly underinformed about the special counsel processes and the role of the Attorney General.

–Unlike the members of the skews media, AG Barr listens carefully and has the skill and ability to politely, succinctly, and clearly answer questions and point out the illogic used to frame many of them.

–Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would rather have been in The Mad Dentist’s chair and having his teeth extracted without painkiller than standing behind AG Barr at the press conference.

As AG Barr promised, the entire redacted version of the Mueller report has been posted on the Department of Justice’s website.

AG Barr also explained that with the exception of 6(e) material, key Congressional Committee chairmen will be allowed to view the otherwise unredacted version of the Mueller report.  I have little doubt that the names of all those allowed to view it will be recorded on a bigot list.

The headline for journalist John Solomon’s April 7, 2019, column for The Hill online is framed as a question:

Ukranian to US prosecutors:  Why don’t you want our evidence on Democrats?

The answer is that the proffered “evidence” appears to implicate Democrat soon-to-be-presidential-candidate Joe “Hands-On” Biden and his son, Hunter, in statutory violations that make Paul Manafort look like a choir boy.

But if that’s so, then why hasn’t the Trump Department of Justice jumped all over the “evidence” and run with it to the nearest television skews camera crew and microphones?

Here’s a thought:   Attorney General Barr is actually competent and ethical.  I suspect he fully understands that some of the ultra-liberal loyalist attorney holdovers from the Lynch and Holder DoJ are as difficult to get rid of as a bad case of foot fungus.   It was these attorneys who turned a willful blind eye to the facial absurdity of the Steele Dossier’s allegations about presidential candidate Trump.  They would love for AG Barr to damage the Trump presidency by being as stupid as Holder and Lynch were.

In fact, Barr and some of the many honest FBI employees and DoJ attorneys may very well be carefully and critically examining the evidence offered by the Ukranians implicating the Biden Gang.  They may even be looking at some of the Biden Gang’s dealings with the People’s Republic of China (we hope!).

There is nearly incontrovertible evidence Barack Obama and his AGs Lynch and Holder sought to use the law enforcement and intelligence resources of the United States government in a tyrranical move to defeat Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election.   Their effort had a lot of help from our demonstrably failed “free press” including Bezos’ Bozos at the Washington Post, Sulzberger’s and Slim’s Slimes at the New York Times, and nearly all the network and cable “skews” departments.

AG Barr’s DoJ is trying to remove the  septic tank sludge layer and sterilize the institutional space that Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and Loretta Lynch produced at DoJ.  Hopefully Barr won’t get sucked in by the stuff he’s trying to clean up.

Fox News is reporting that 29-year-old Juan Manuel Flores Del Toro, the Mexican citizen who shot and killed 42-year-old Kittitas County Sheriff’s Deputy Ryan Thompson and wounded 22-year-old Kittitas Police Officer Benito Chavez Tuesday night, was in the US illegally.    Imagine that.

According to ICE, Flores Del Toro entered the U.S. at Laredo, Texas, in April 2014 on a temporary agricultural worker visa.  There was no record of the murderer ever leaving the US or extending his visa.

Hopefully the continuing investigation will reveal his list of employers in the US as well as his motivation for shooting and killing Deputy Thompson and wounding Officer Chavez.   I’m assuming that there will be an effort to determine from whom and by what means Flores Del Toro illegally obtained the gun he used to murder Deputy Thompson and wound Officer Chavez.

Flores Del Toro was shot during the exchange of gunfire with the officers and died at the hospital.

According to John Solomon’s article entitled Senior Ukrainian official says he’s opened probe into US election interference
posted March 20, 2019, at 10:33 AM EDT, online at The Hill, “Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko … is probing a claim from a member of the Ukrainian parliament that the director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Artem Sytnyk, attempted to the benefit of the 2016 U.S. presidential election on behalf of Hillary Clinton.”

Solomon’s article suggests that NABU’s Sytnyk provided the allegedly damaging financial information about Paul Manafort’s business dealings in Ukraine specifically to undermine the Trump campaign and to provide support for the Clinton campaign.

Sounds like meddling by a high-level Ukraine official (Sytnyk) in the US presidential election.

Someone might wonder what benefit Sytnyk received in advance or was promised after Clinton became President.   And who provided that benefit?

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Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was Josef Stalin’s marshal of the Soviet Union.   In 1921, Beria was chosen for the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage—the infamous Cheka—the new Soviet Union’s secret police in charge of eliminating “enemies of the state,” and he became known for the violent methods he employed. By maneuvering Georgia to succumb to centralized Bolshevik control, Beria rose to the position of chairman of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, known as the NKVD, in the region.and the ruthless head of the secret police, the NKVD.  (Paragraph source:  https://www.biography.com/people/lavrentiy-beria-21345281)

Beria reportedly said, “Show me the man, I’ll find you the crime.”

Beria began with a presumption “the man,” any and every man, was guilty of something.  In the absence of evidence of “the crime,” Beria would simply fabricate evidence to prove “the man’s” guilt of something.  Then he would order “the man” executed or imprisoned.  “The man’s” actual guilt of anything was meaningless.  It was enough that Beria, Stalin, and others believed him to be an enemy of the state.

Beria would likely have been proud of the methods employed by Deputy US Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, US Representative Adam Schiff, and US Representative Jerrold Nadler and others to try and find a reason, any reason at all, to prosecute or at least impeach and remove Donald J. Trump for daring to win the 2016 election and be sworn in as President of the United States.  It appears to me they began with “a man” whom they wanted to remove or drive from office, and then they began the process of trying to find evidence, any evidence at all that would support a process, any process, to remove him.

I’d say Rosenstein, Schiff, and Nadler would look right at home in Beria’s uniform.

On Monday, March 11, 2019, The Washington Times published an online article headlined Support for Trump dwindles among ICE officers.

The article succinctly outlines the allegation of the National ICE Council, the union that represents ICE officers, that “… President Trump … has failed to follow through on his get-tough [campaign] promises, saying catch-and-release of immigrants living illegally in the U.S. is not only still happening, but has gone into ‘overdrive’.”

The article refers to a letter from leaders of the National ICE Council addressed to President Trump expressing their explicit concerns.  Here are links to each of the four pages in the letter:

Page 1     Page 2     Page 3     Page 4

This sounds like a letter of desperation from ICE officers.  For them (or more accurately, the National ICE Council representing them) to go directly to the President and over the heads of ICE Acting Director Ron Vitiello and DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is a very remarkable act suggesting ICE’s lack of confidence in both Secretary Nielsen and Acting Director Vitiello.  More importantly, it informs the President of the obvious friction between ICE officers and their counterparts in the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection.

Often these types of letters are never seen by the President.  This one should reach him unfiltered and unedited by DHS or White House staff.  If the allegations in the letter by National ICE Council members are timely and accurate, then the Senate should not just rubber-stamp its approval for Vitiello’s appointment and the President should have a private discussion with Secretary Nielsen.

If the letter does make it to the President’s desk, I hope he reads it and takes appropriate action.

If you’re seriously interested in better understanding the issues, policies, and practices that are covered by the very broad umbrella term “border security,” then I strongly recommend you obtain a copy of a entitled Border Security, Second Edition.  The second edition was revised and copyrighted in 2018.

Because this was written primarily as an almost 500-page academic university textbook, it does not place sole emphasis on terrorism or illegal migration.  Neither is it driven by some political agenda.   It is written for colleges and universities that have or may be contemplating homeland security programs as either standalone programs or incorporated  in political science, anthropology, journalism, or sociology courses.

However, it is very expensive.  From Amazon the cost of the trade paper book plus tax and shipping was nearly $78.00.

Being the cheapskate that I am and before deciding to buy the book for myself, I obtained it through the Hayden Library via interlibrary loan from Central Carolina Community College.   That’s a very good way to try before you buy.

Rather than risk violating copyright by scanning and including the 8-page detailed Contents, I’ll just list the chapters and titles. (more…)