In an apparently undated and heavily redacted declassified memorandum released today,  Senators Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham of the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary have referred “… Christopher Steele to the Department of Justice for investigation of potential violation(s) of 18 U.S.C. § 1001.”

Steele’s mostly unsubstantiated “dossier,” funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton Campaign, apparently played a significant role in the FBI’s obtaining a FISA warrant to wiretap former Trump campaign staffer Carter Page.  (See OpenCdA post dated February 2, 2018, entitled Nunes (HPSCI) Memo Released.)

The referral suggests that the Senate Judiciary Committee believes Steele may have knowingly and willfully (1) falsifie[d], conceal[ed], or cover[ed] up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; or (2) ma[de] any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3) ma[de] or use[d] any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry in an investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate.

The FBI and DoJ included Steele’s “dossier” or parts of it in their FISA warrant application.  One issue is whether the FBI adequately informed the FISA Court Judge that the “dossier” information included in the FISA warrant application had not been verified by the FBI and was, in fact, created as an opposition research document funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton Campaign.

The memos like today’s and the Nunes’ memo are interesting, however the real meat of the info would come from the FISA warrant  initial and renewal applications  and any supporting documentation attached.  What the affiant represented to the FISA Court and what the affiant should have told the Court but failed to fully disclose or completely withheld are important.

Here is the six-page package (authorization/declassification letter and four-page memorandum) released February 2, 2018,  by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).  The memorandum’s subject is Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In reading the memorandum’s header including its classification, we can clearly see the memo was written to and for the HPSCI Majority Members, and it was prepared by the HPSCI Majority Staff.   The Majority and Minority Staffs and Members would already have had access to some and maybe all of the underlying information from which the memo was derived.

Already the FBI and others have criticized the memo’s release, asserting that some information essential to fully understanding the memo has been omitted.  Again, the memo’s intended recipients had access to that information; incidental recipients such as the public may not.

It is my understanding that the HPSCI Minority Staff may have prepared its own version of this memo as a counterpoint to the memo linked above.

I hope that after being sanitized using the same standards as were used to sanitize the memo linked above, the HPSCI Minority Staff’s own memo will be timely released to the public as well.

As for the efforts to devalue and discredit the memo by pointing out the obvious absence of the underlying information necessary to more fully understand the memo, the remedy is obvious:  Sanitize all the information and release it to the public.  Shine more light, not less, on the alleged abuses of the FISA by the DoJ and FBI.  This proposed massive public release of sanitized information is very unlikely to happen.

Then again …

According to this Judicial Watch press release issued February 2, 2018, “Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Justice Department for FBI documents regarding the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant application submitted to – and responses from – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court related to alleged collusion between Russia and Trump campaign associates (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-00245)).”

Even prior to the memo’s release today, there have been Congressmen calling for yet another special counsel to look into the FBI’s conduct in the Clinton email server and Uranium One investigation.  That, however, is already under investigation by the DoJ’s Inspector General, and his report is expected sometime in March 2018.

I believe it would be wise for everyone to calm down and wait for the DoJ OIG’s report.  It may answer many relevant questions factually rather than speculatively.

In any case and as suggested in my January 10, 2018, OpenCdA post entitled So It Never Happens Again …, I believe that an independent commission similar to the Warren Commission would be a better alternative to yet another politicized special counsel.  Both the FBI and the DoJ have longstanding internal problems at the executive level (Mahogany Row).   Particularly at Main Justice, these problems extend beyond the current allegations of FISA abuses.

Even if FBI Director Wray and Attorney General Sessions have the political will and the horsepower necessary to pump the septic sludge out of their own tanks, they would benefit from a little more help in shining light into the tanks and exorcising the most stubborn stuff.  A Warren Commission-like effort could help wall them off from interference by executive, legislative, and judicial partisan politics.

Government agencies can become complacent and sloppy.  Sometimes the complacency and sloppiness leads to corruption or worse, someone gets hurt or killed.  Though the agency heads may change from time to time as political administrations change, the agency head’s immediate subordinates often remain.  Often those immediate subordinates have titles such as Deputy this or Associate that.   Complacency, sloppiness, corruption, and criminal conduct occur further down among agency employees because it is being tolerated and sometimes directed by the inhabitants of an agency’s Mahogany Row.  Institutional complacency and sloppiness oozes down from the top.

In spite of my using an image of the front page headline from the September 28, 1964, New York Times, this OpenCdA post is not about revamping the US Secret Service.    The photo referring to President Kennedy’s murder and the resulting Warren Commission was used to emphasize the importance of federal agencies’ operations being subjected to regular critical Congressional oversight and then making appropriate corrections before official rebuke becomes necessary.

The Warren Commission examination of the US Secret Service after President Kennedy’s murder was necessary.  The changes the Commission made were long overdue and were far more expansive than the public, unclassified version of the Warren Commission Report reflected.

Having watched carefully the pre- and now  post-2016 election circus back in Fantasyland-on-the-Potomac,  I believe top-down, Warren Commission-like examinations of both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Department of Justice (DoJ) are also critically necessary and need  to begin soon.  There appears to have been DoJ and FBI malfeasance, criminal conduct, and the abuses of investigative authority including misleading and possibly outright lying to the FISA Court to obtain FISA Court warrants to surveil persons associated with the Trump Campaign and possibly candidate, nominee, and now-President Trump himself.

Sensitive information selectively leaked from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and public information found in recent Congressional hearings strongly suggest that before and after November 8, 2016,  some headquarters executive and supervisory level  officials of both the FBI and DoJ apparently looked into the funhouse mirrors adorning their Mahogany Row office walls.    Apparently they saw a messianic face  looking back at them.  Perhaps believing the image they saw in their mirrors to be above the laws of the United States,  they may have concluded they had been divinely anointed to undo President Donald J. Trump’s election, in their minds an unthinkable wrong committed by “deplorable” voters on November 8, 2016.

If the DoJ and FBI abused intelligence assets and statutory authority, the abuses represent a grave threat to the national security.   They completely undermine the trust and confidence the citizens of the United States must have in these agencies. (more…)

All right!  Now they’ve done it!   They’ve gone one step too far!

It’s one thing for the anti-Trumpers in the FBI and DoJ to allegedly criminally conspire to overthrow the duly-elected President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

That’s bad enough, but now it’s being reported that Nellie Ohr, wife of DoJ official Bruce Ohr who met with Trump Dossier author Christopher Steele, is an amateur radio operator.  Her Technician Class license was granted by the Federal Communications Commission on May 23, 2016.  The radio talk show/internet/skews media rumor mill suggests she and a co-conspirator may have been communicating via ham radio in hopes of avoiding interception by the NSA.  (The flaw in that reasoning is obvious to anyone with a ham ticket.)

Now ol’ Nellie KM4UDZ has really stirred up the hornet’s nest.  If she thinks being pursued by the entire intelligence community plus the US Congress is irritating, just wait until she feels the wrath of the FCC.  Boy, is she ever in trouble now!  Why, they may even revoke her ham radio license!

And being a ham radio operator myself, I’m mad, too.  I just may go stick a pin through her antenna feedline.  That’ll show her!

73’s,

Bill WB7NLR

OpenCdA urges Idaho state, county, and city officials as well as emergency medical facilities’ planners to not just read but carefully study the Final Report – Independent Review of the 2017 Protest Events in Charlottesville, Virginia.  It was prepared by Hunton & Williams LLP and released November 24, 2017.

Readers may recall that during the summer of 2017, there was a series of protest events in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Generally, these events involved demonstrations both supporting and opposing the City’s decision to remove the statutes of two Civil War confederate generals, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee, from public display.

The protest events in July and August often involved concurrent and opposing demonstrations that required local government planning and law enforcement interevention.

In particular, the demonstration on August 12 received persistent coverage from the national skews media.   It was in that demonstration that a demonstrator, Heather Heyer, was struck and killed by a car driven by an opposing demonstrator, James Fields.    Her death and President Trump’s appropriately neutral comments about the demonstrators became the focus of the skews media coverage.  The Final Report explains how failures to plan, execute, and communicate by state and local government and law enforcement contributed to her death.

There are many lessons to be learned from the 220-page report.  OpenCdA hopes that Idaho state, county, and local government, medical, and public safety agencies will heed them.

Preceding OpenCdA posts have opined that President Trump’s swamp draining should start in the Mahogany Row floors of both the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building and the J. Edgar Hoover F.B.I. Building.

Today a Washington Post skewspaper article headlined Top FBI official assigned to Mueller’s Russia probe said to have been removed after sending anti-Trump texts identified the “Top FBI official” as Peter Strzok, deputy head of counterintelligence at the FBI.  OpenCdA believes Strzok’s correct title was Deputy Chief, Counterintelligence Section.   Strzok was removed earlier this summer but identified publicly only recently.

OpenCdA is concerned about the “politically charged texts disparaging President Trump and supporting Hillary Clinton” Strzok exchanged with another member of Mueller’s team.  However, we are equally concerned about  Strzok’s extramarital affair with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who worked for FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

This was the most laughable paragraph in the skews article:

Defenders of Strzok and Page inside the FBI said that because there was no direct supervisory role between Page and Strzok in the workplace, there wasn’t anything professionally wrong about having an affair, but they added that they understood why Mueller would not want anyone engaged in such conduct on his team. For one thing, if a foreign intelligence agency learned of such an affair, they could try to use it as a means of blackmail, although there’s no evidence anyone outside the FBI was aware of the relationship.

As any intelligence service case officer knows and Strzok should have known,  an “extramarital affair” can fit both the “C” and the “E” in M.I.C.E.   If Strzok and his “defenders” don’t believe the Russian SVR might have had an inkling, they should be forced to sit through every counterespionage public service video the Feebs have ever produced.  And we certainly don’t agree that “there wasn’t anything professionally wrong” with it.

Strzok was one of the high-level Feebs running the Feeble’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.     Hillary Clinton isn’t the only one who wonders “What Happened.”

OpenCdA readers may remember former FBI Director James Comey’s public statement on July 5, 2016, regarding Hillary Clinton’s criminal culpability for using her illegal and unsecured private email server to handle and unlawfully disclose national security information.

In that statement, Comey said, “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.” [emphasis OpenCdA’s]

Why did former FBI Director James Comey say, “… our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case [prosecute Hillary Clinton for jeopardizing national security with her private email server]”?

Listening to Comey when he made the statement, we immediately picked up on the exact phrases we’ve highlighted.   OpenCdA’s thought upon hearing Comey’s statement was that the FBI may have been running an offensive counterintelligence operation (OFCO) against the Russians.  We alluded to that in our July 14, 2016, OpenCdA post entitled It’s a ‘Bigot List’.

Our suspicions about an FBI OFCO seems to have been confirmed publicly for the first time in The Hill reporter John Solomon’s November 20, 2017, article entitled FBI informant gathered years of evidence on Russian push for US nuclear fuel deals, including Uranium One, memos show. The article identifies the FBI’s confidential source publicly as ‘William Campbell.’

There is additional information in another Solomon article on the same day.  It was entitled Five new revelations in the Russian uranium case.

One question historians will ask is, What did Hillary Clinton know about ‘William Campbell’ and when did she know it?   It is doubtful we will ever know the complete answer.

In their zeal to drive President Donald J. Trump from office by distorting what he actually said immediately following the riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017, the skews media have apparently chosen to avoid seeking the answers to far more important and newsworthy questions.

Had the City of Charlottesville, Albemarle County, and the Commonwealth of Virginia properly planned and prepared for the event and the reasonably foreseeable civil disturbance that occurred?  Were the Charlottesville, Albemarle County, and Virginia public safety departments and offices of emergency management ready?  In short, could the events leading to three deaths and numerous injuries and arrests have been avoided if Charlottesville, Albemarle County, and the Commonwealth had been better prepared?

Lest readers think of these as nitpicky questions asked by this Monday morning third-string (on a good day) quarterback in Roadkill, Idaho, we would point out they were a part of Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe’s statement on August 14, 2017.

We note that in his statement Governor McAuliffe directed  his staff to hand-pick commission members  “…from community organizations, faith leaders, and law enforcement to make actionable recommendations for executive and legislative solutions to advance our mission of reconciliation, unity, and public safety.”

OpenCdA would have preferred to see Governor McAuliffe place a greater emphasis on “public safety” rather than the feel-good social justice empty talk, but McAuliffe’s gubernatorial priorities are entirely consistent with his personal and political biases and prejudices.   Events that produce martyrs (real or manufactured after the fact) have more propaganda value than events that go off without a hitch.

Governor McAuliffe’s commission members are not social justice warriors.  Their duty is to provide the Commonwealth with recommendations to ensure the safety and preserve the freedoms of all the people who reside in and visit the Commonwealth.

We also hope that sooner rather than later, our free press is reminded that its duty and responsibility is to timely, accurately, and completely report the news, not skew it to fit the political and social whims of the media owners and the politicians whom they try to enslave.   That duty and responsibility seems to have been lost in the noise.