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March 30, 2017

SSCI Hearings: Russian Influence on the 2016 US Presidential Election

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: Coeur d'Alene Election, Counterintelligence, Disinformation, MSS, News Reporting, Trump Impeachment, Voter Fraud — Bill @ 8:24 pm

On Thursday, March 30, 2017, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) held an entire day of public hearings in Washington, DC. The SSCI was looking into the allegations that the Russians had influenced the outcome of the 2016 presidential election which elected Donald F. Trump to be the 45th President of the United States. The nature of its duty, Congressional oversight of US intelligence activities, results in very few open public hearings.

OpenCdA watched these hearings lasting just over five hours. Congressional hearings are nearly always predominantly boring speechifying by self-serving elected Congressional representatives. These two hearings today were not boring, and there was nearly no partisan speechifying.

The Senators on the SSCI were exceptionally well-prepared and asked on-point, insightful questions. The content of their questions and the perspectives and expertise offered by the witnesses suggested that Congress has finally recognized the ongoing threat that information warfare or information operations presents to the United States. Senators took these hearings and the information from them very seriously. We should, too.

OpenCdA urges citizens who are serious about understanding how effectively the Russians use information warfare strategies and tactics to offset a superior kinetic warfare force will find these five hours of hearings remarkably understandable and educational. The same readers will also better understand just how effectively Russia has manipulated our free press (AKA: the skews media) to influence public opinion. Unfortunately, the hearings also revealed in living color just how derelict our elected officials have been since about 1990 in recognizing the existence, let alone the gravity of info war and info ops.

Here are links to video of Thursday’s hearings.

Morning Hearing: Disinformation: A Primer in Russian Active Measures and Influence Campaigns

Afternoon Hearing: Disinformation: A Primer in Russian Active Measures and Influence Campaigns

OpenCdA hopes that especially younger readers will take time to watch these hearings. You need to understand just how your choice of news delivery platform, often social media like Twitter and Facebook and not just the traditional print and broadcast media, is being manipulated to shape the disinformation you read every day. You will also hear just how easily the Russians turned President Trump’s frequent Tweets against him.

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November 14, 2016

FBI Director Comey’s Letters

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: Espionage, Lynch, MSS, Public Corruption, Trump Impeachment — Bill @ 7:20 pm

Predictably, Hillary Clinton blames FBI Director James Comey for her loss in the 2016 presidential election. She asserts that Comey’s July and October comments and letters to certain Congressional oversight committee chairmen and minority ranking members caused some of her supporters to vote for Trump or at least not vote for her.

Assume she’s correct about the influence Comey’s letters may have had on some voters.

The real question, then, is whether Comey acted with malice or favoritism toward either nominee. Did he intend to influence the outcome of the election?

OpenCdA doesn’t think he did. An equally strong and even more plausible argument is that Comey was performing the duties required and expected of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Hillary Clinton’s illegal storage and retention of national security information on her unsecured private email server and her illegally allowing unauthorized persons (e.g., her housekeeper) to handle and view that information elevated the severity of her actions. More than just violating statutes and administrative orders, Clinton maliciously jeopardized the national security. As Secretary of State, Clinton was required to know and understand the various national security regulations and laws to not only conform her own conduct but also to ensure her employees complied with those regulations and laws as well. By virtue of her position, she knew using the private email server to traffic in national security information was wrong. She cannot claim ignorance as a defense.

As we’ve pointed out in several preceding OpenCdA posts, the FBI has multiple responsibilities. Not all of them will or should end in an arrest, prosecution, and trial. Protecting the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage is frequently at the top of that list.

Whether the Clintons want to admit it or not, their knowingly allowing her server to be used to exchange national security information seriously jeopardized the national security. Using BleachBit overwrite software, Clinton intentionally tried to hide evidence of her culpability from the Intelligence Community. The effect was that she obstructed the Intelligence Community’s effort to assess the damage done to national security. She made it difficult and maybe impossible to conclusively itemize what national security information was actually compromised and by whom.

If the Clinton private email server had not been used to traffic in national security information, it would likely not have been of even passing interest to Congress. But once the FBI determined the server had been used to unlawfully store national security information, it had a duty to investigate and keep Congress informed about the threat to national security. To do otherwise is to make it difficult or impossible for Congress to exercise its responsibility to oversee Executive Branch departments and agencies.

FBI Director James Comey was between the dog and the fire hydrant, but it was Hillary Clinton who pumped the dog full of diuretics when she created her illegal email server and used it to illegally traffic in national security information.

FBI Director James Comey did not conceive, build, and use the backchannel unsecured email system. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did.

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November 1, 2016

Cooperating Witness? Or Defendant?

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: Espionage, Lynch, MSS — Bill @ 4:42 pm

Now we learn that the FBI discovered some Hillary email server case emails on the laptop computer of none other than Huma Abedin’s estranged husband Anthony “Carlos Danger” Weiner.

Through her personal attorney, Abedin states she didn’t know those emails were on Anthony Weiner’s computer.

If Abedin is denying using Carlos’ computer for work-related emails, then how did the emails get there?

It appears to OpenCdA that the FBI now owns Huma Abedin. She swore under oath that she had turned over all devices containing Clinton email server related messages.

It also appears to us that Abedin has two choices: She can become a fully cooperating truth-telling witness in the FBI’s investigations of both Clinton’s email and her family’s foundation, or she can become a defendant and risk spending time in a federal penitentiary. Since daddy is likely already facing prison time for soliciting sex with an underage girl, if Huma wants to give their four year-old son Jordan some semblance of a normal life, it shouldn’t be a difficult choice.

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October 27, 2016

… And Now We Know Who and Why

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: Espionage, Lynch, MSS, Public Corruption — Bill @ 12:59 pm

FBI Director James Comey’s July 5th announcement surprised many people, but it completely stunned the over 100 FBI investigators and 6 DoJ National Security Division attorneys who had worked on the Clinton private email server investigation. The investigative team had nearly unanimously recommended charging Democrat Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton with numerous very serious violations of national security laws.

But thanks to recent FBI releases of more of her emails which Clinton thought she had not only deleted but overwritten as well, the world now knows that President Barack Hussein Obama had directed his sycophant Attorney General Loretta Lynch that under no circumstances was Clinton to be charged with any crimes.

Many people would assume Obama’s order to Lynch was to protect Clinton’s candidacy. But again thanks to the FBI releases of the emails, even liberal propaganda mills the New York Times and Politico were forced to report that Obama was more likely trying to prevent one of his own very serious lies to the American public from being revealed.

On March 15, 2015, Obama gave a highly-publicized interview in which he told the world he had learned about Clinton’s private email server the same way as everyone else — from the news. The Clinton email dump reveals that Obama was lying, and Hillary Clinton, her lawyer Cheryl Mills, and her campaign advisor John Podesta knew it. A March 7, 2015, email from Mills to Podesta told Podesta about emails from Obama (using a pseudonym) to Clinton on her private server that long predated his March 15, 2015, interview. Here are the Politico story and the New York Times story.

And now we know why FBI Director James Comey said what he said on July 5.

Comey almost certainly had been told by Lynch that she really didn’t care what evidence the FBI and DoJ investigators found. She had already made an agreement with Barack Hussein Obama to decline prosecuting Clinton. Why? Because any prosecution of Clinton would most certainly have revealed the President’s own bald-faced lie to the people.

Infinitely more worrisome than Obama’s lie to the public, a Clinton criminal trial could and probably would reveal that Obama was aware the server was illegally being used to store classified information. Even the very bribable Democrats and lily-livered Republicans in Congress would be forced to deliberate impeachment, not of Obama (who will presumably be gone on January 20, 2017) but of President Hillary Clinton.

Loretta Lynch’s loyalty may at some point in her legal career have been to the principle of rule of law and the US Constitution. No longer. Loretta Lynch’s loyalty is to Barack Hussein Obama. The public will rightly wonder what tangible gratuity Lynch will receive in return from the Clintons or their Foundation.

It’s highly doubtful that Lynch has either the personal or professional integrity and dignity to follow in the steps of Nixon’s Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. They resigned rather than follow Nixon’s politically-motivated orders to fire the special prosecutor. Lynch didn’t even have the courage to refuse to meet privately on her government airplane with the disgraced former President William Jefferson Clinton even though her Justice Department was investigating Clinton’s wife for her crimes which gravely imperil the national security.

The American public should be very, very concerned that Obama’s US Department of Justice, particularly but not exclusively Mahogany Row at Main Justice, has become so politicized.

One of the often-heard arguments against Hillary Clinton’s presidency is that she will likely be able to appoint at least three US Supreme Court justices. Voters need to recognize that it is worse than that.

The ideological contamination will not be limited to appellate decisions by the US Supreme Court.

The next President will appoint not only Supreme Court justices. The next President will also appoint some new or additional federal judges and appoint or reappoint some or all of the 94 US Attorneys. For citizens who need to seek the remedy and justice of the federal courts, the thought that any or all of those appointees could be like Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch or Janet Reno or John Mitchell or Ed Meese or Alberto Gonzales is terrifying.

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September 11, 2016

Deep Throat, Ver. 2.0?

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: Espionage, Lynch, MSS — Bill @ 1:45 pm

Will present FBI Director James Comey be revealed in the footnotes of history as ‘Deep Throat, Ver. 2.0?’

OpenCdA certainly hopes so. It would help explain Comey’s contradictory conduct in the Clinton email and Foundation investigations. Out of one side of his mouth, Comey has laid out sufficient evidence for the criminal indictment of Hillary Clinton on numerous violations of national security and criminal law. Yet out of the other side, he has said no reasonable prosecutor would even consider such a filing.

We cling to one last very weak straw of hope that Comey and the FBI have not succumbed to Beltway Toxicity and subordinated the country’s foundational principle of the rule of law to the rule of man (or woman).

Comey knows that the decision to charge or not charge Hillary Clinton with the crimes she has allegedly committed rests exclusively with the US Attorney General and her headnodders on Mahogany Row at Main Justice.

OpenCdA readers will recall, however, that after what Attorney General Loretta Lynch said was a purely spontaneous meeting between her and Slick Willy in late June on the tarmac at Sky Harbor Aiport, Lynch promptly said she would not make the decision to charge or not charge, leaving it up to her subordinates at Main Justice.

Our hope is that Comey is doing publicly what former FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt did sub rosa during Watergate: Turn whistle-blower to get evidence of Hillary Clinton’s culpability into the voters’ hands. For years Felt was identified only by the pseudonym ‘Deep Throat’ in connection with the Watergate scandal.

Unlike Mark Felt who astutely played on the Washington Post owner Katharine Graham’s disdain for Nixon, Comey has chosen to neuter the Clinton-worshipping skews media by going directly to the people. With his initial public statement on July 5, 2016, and then with the FBI’s release of its summary of the investigation in a bury-it-deep news dump the Friday before Labor Day, Comey has laid out the evidence showing more than enough to support criminal indictments of Clinton and some of her close associates. The skews media had to report Comey’s releases even though the facts undermined Clinton’s and the media’s assertions of innocence.

Of course, we have acknowledged being wrong about Loretta Lynch’s judgment and integrity, so we must also consider that this Wall Street Journal editorial and this Breitbart exposé may have been more on the mark about FBI Director James Comey.

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September 1, 2016

The ‘Co-equal’ Remedy

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: Espionage, MSS — Bill @ 1:51 pm

Many months ago I was discussing with a friend the unlikely success of Donald Trump’s and Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential runs. Neither appeared likely to be even close to becoming his respective party’s nominee out of the conventions.

At the time however, I commented that if either Donald Trump or Senator Sanders would be his respective party’s nominee in the 2016 presidential election, my hope was that the other would also be his own party’s nominee. Goofy as that sounds, I was serious.

My rationale was that if either Trump or Sanders was destined to be elected and inaugurated President of the United States, it would force our bicameral Congress to sober up, set aside partisan differences, and take seriously for a change its duties to the country. That would include using all of its various Constitutionally enumerated powers to minimize the damage either President Trump or President Sanders could do if unchecked. That was precisely what the framers of the Constitution sought in creating three co-equal branches of government. (more…)

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July 24, 2016

Oh, The Irony!

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: Espionage, Lynch, MSS — Bill @ 12:37 pm

Open CdA wonders if our three or four loyal readers fully see the irony in the Democratic National Committee’s assertion that it was the Russians who hacked into the DNC’s emails and got embarrassing information revealing how the DNC sought to sabotage Senator Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign?

And yet if Attorney General Loretta Lynchpin and the Jefe Feeb are to be believed, they just couldn’t seem to find any indication at all that Russia’s SVR (the foreign intelligence service) or the FSB (counterintelligence) even knew about Clinton’s unsecured private email server which contained very sensitive national security information.

If it was funny, we would be laughing. It isn’t, and we aren’t.

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July 14, 2016

It’s a ‘Bigot List’

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: Espionage, MSS — Bill @ 9:33 am

Fox News is hyperventilating over what it calls a ‘gag order’ on the FBI agents involved in the Clinton email server investigation. Some of the FBI employees involved in the investigation were required to sign a ‘Case Briefing Acknowledgement’ form, essentially a non-disclosure form.

This is, in fact, a practice dating back at least to World War II when it was little more than a list of persons who had been granted access to special compartments of extremely sensitive information. It was first referred to as a ‘Bigot List’. ‘Bigot’ was reportedly the codeword used to identify one particular compartment. It has come to refer more broadly to a counterintelligence tool to simply keep track of who had authorized access to particularly sensitive national security information.

In his letter of July 6, 2016, to FBI Director James Comey, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley suggests the requirement for FBI employees to sign the acknowledgement form was done to thwart statutorily-permitted whistleblowing to Congress. No, Chuck, it was intended to protect very sensitive national security information from unauthorized disclosure. It was intended to remind those given access of their duty to protect that information. Almost anyone who has been ‘read on’ for authorized access to certain types of sensitive compartmented information has signed a similar form. That, by the way, almost certainly includes Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State.

It is no surprise that some FBI employees were required to sign the acknowledgement. For us on the outside who care to pay attention, it may partially reveal the reasons the FBI Director recommended to the Attorney General that Clinton not be prosecuted criminally for the various criminal violations that may have been associated with her private email server.

In its investigation of Clinton’s private email server, the FBI is between the dog and the fire hydrant. It has two distinct roles: criminal investigation and foreign counterintelligence. Of the two, the latter affects our national security; the former affects Clinton’s liberty.

On criminal charges relating to the compromise of national security information, it would be horrendously challenging to secure a meaningful criminal conviction of Hillary Clinton without risking further compromise of our national security, including our ability to investigate and counteract future threats against it.

On the other hand, removing the foreign counterintelligence violations by declining to prosecute them does not automatically preclude using evidence of non-national security crimes (e.g., perjury, bribery, lying to Congress, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, racketeering, wire and mail frauds, etc.) uncovered in the server investigation from being used in subsequent federal criminal prosecutions. It would, however, make it more difficult for Hillary Clinton and her defense lawyers to use ‘graymail’ to impede her prosecution on federal crimes not requiring sensitive national security information or procedures as evidence.

Hillary Clinton’s continued access to national security information represents an exceptionally grave threat to the national security of the United States. The threat it poses is in her utter indifference to her responsibilities to safeguard national security information entrusted to her. It appears she considers national security information to be little more than another token to be exchanged to further her own attainment of political power and personal wealth. President Obama who nominated her to be his Secretary of State and the 94 US Senators who for their own political purposes voted to confirm her share the responsibility for the damage she has done to the national security.

While many people want the satisfaction of seeing Hillary Clinton indicted, convicted, and imprisoned, the real power to forever prevent her from being able to continue further harm to the national security rests with the voters in November. The voters can peacefully and lawfully deny her the presidency. I’d argue that would also be a far more fitting and beneficial punishment for the harm she has done to the national security.

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July 6, 2016

FBI Director’s Statement: What Does It Mean?

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: Espionage, MSS — Bill @ 12:16 pm

In a prepared statement to the media yesterday FBI Director James Comey declared the FBI has determined “…no charges are appropriate in this case.” He’s referring to Hillary Clinton’s private email server having been improperly used to store and communicate national security information.

So what does Director Comey’s declaration mean? It means exactly what it says and nothing more: The FBI does not recommend to the Department of Justice (DoJ) that any criminal complaints relating to the email server be filed or indictments sought against anyone in that matter.

Ultimately the decision to seek indictment or an arrest warrant rests entirely with the DoJ in its role as prosecuting attorney over federal laws.

If they choose, the layers of lawyers at Main Justice can accept the FBI’s recommendation, reject it, or after evaluating the results of the FBI’s investigation, direct the FBI to investigate further before DoJ makes its charging decision.

So is it over?

No. Not until the DoJ lawyers say it’s over. If and when the feds decide prosecution is warranted and most appropriate, it is still on the table as long as the actions commence within the statutes of limitations on the crimes alleged.

As we’ve commented in previous OpenCdA posts on this matter, criminal prosecution is not the most important or even the most desirable result of the FBI’s investigation. (more…)

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