RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/new-durham-bombshell-fbi-paid-russian-accused-lying

In a bombshell revelation, Special Prosecutor John Durham revealed Tuesday in court filings that the FBI paid a Russian businessman as a confidential human source in the investigation of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign even though it had prior concerns that businessman was tied to Moscow’s intelligence services.

Durham persuaded the federal judge in the upcoming trial of Igor Danchenko to unseal a motion revealing that Danchenko, the primary source of the now-discredited Steele dossier, was paid by the FBI as a confidential human source for more than three years until the fall of 2020 when he was terminated for lying to agents.

Danchenko is charged with five counts of lying to the bureau during that relationship and faces trial next month in federal court in the Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C.

“In March 2017, the FBI signed the defendant up as a paid confidential human source of the FBI,” Durham’s unsealed court filing disclosed for the first time. “The FBI terminated its source relationship with the defendant in October 2020. As alleged in further detail below, the defendant lied to FBI agents during several of these interviews.”

The revelation means that the FBI first fired former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, the author of the Hillary Clinton-funded dossier, as a human source in November 2016 for having unauthorized contacts with the news media. And it then turned around a few months later and hired Steele’s primary informer to work with the bureau even after determining some of Danchenko’s statements in the Steele dossier were uncorroborated or exaggerated.

Even more stunning, Durham confirmed that the FBI had concerns about Danchenko’s ties to Russian intelligence a decade earlier, opening up a counterintelligence probe on him after learning he was trying to buy classified information from the Obama administration

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/sep/12/rings-of-power-versus-house-of-dragons/

EXCERPTS:

HBO’s “House of The Dragon” and Amazon’s “The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power” provide an instructive contrast. (You might call them fables for our times.) One is about power for power’s sake; the other concerns virtue and containing power.

The “Rings of Power” reflects Lord Acton’s adage: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Like the heroes of “Rings of Power,” the Founding Fathers sought to contain power. The Constitution with its balance of power between the three branches of government and respect for the rights of citizens (another limitation on government) was their genius.

President Joe Biden claims fidelity to the Constitution, while constantly undermining it.

Democrats always seek to expand government. They are wannabe dragon lords who are turning citizens into serfs. Whatever Washington spends, it’s never enough. They view taxpayers as milch cows for the welfare state.

For them, the Constitution is more a series of suggestions than a limitation on the power of the state. Barack Obama said, “I’ve got a pen and a phone” and can do pretty much as I like through executive orders. Mr. Biden is testing the limits of that by transferring $1 trillion in student debt from potentially high-earning graduates to truck drivers and waitresses, without Congressional approval. The Desolation of Joe?

No one gave Mr. Biden the authority to allow roughly one million people to enter the country illegally each year. He did it by simply refusing to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.

Under the direction of Democrats, Congress has spent $4.6 trillion on “emergency” COVID relief measures. The president’s party lavished money on its favorite constituencies (like teachers’ unions) to counteract a shutdown of the economy it engineered.

The Orc army unleashed by social justice warriors spent most of 2020 rampaging through our cities – burning, looting and killing. Democrats used this crisis to push what they call racial justice, including CRT in our schools.

Power is seductive.

Part 1

August 26, 2022

What if you believed that the U.S. was in mortal danger because its elections continually led to the wrong results and policy choices?

What if the “people” were just too ignorant of what was good for them and continually displayed such dangerous cluelessness in how they voted? How could you even work with such chumps, dregs, crazies, clingers, deplorables, and irredeemables?

What if you still gave them lots of chances to reform and become enlightened on climate change, transgenderism, and race relations? And yet still they never appreciated your efforts on their behalf. Instead, they continued to buy AR-15s, or watch NASCAR or buy a RAM 2500 with a 700hp engine.

What if you worked hard to instruct these idiots through the media, social media, the arts, entertainment, foundations, academia, public schools, professional sports, Hollywood, Wall Street, and even the corporate board room—and yet still despite your control of the nation’s messaging and influencing, the dumb electorate voted for ignoramuses and unqualified buffoons?

What then would you be willing to do to save the country?

In a word, you would say “democracy dies in darkness” (darkness as in ignorance). And then you would scream “FORWARD!” And rally, with “YES, WE CAN!”

Then, as the saints you are, you would have to “intervene” extra-legally to save America. There would be no other choice. That is, you would have to destroy democracy to save it.

So, what you would do?

STEP ONE. Go after the wrong-minded Supreme Court. Discredit it. Have senators declare it “illegitimate.” Talk openly of ways the Pentagon or National Parks could avoid or weaken the Court’s rulings by creating sanctuary areas immune from federal jurisdiction.

Have the senate majority leader lead a mob to the court’s very doors and openly threaten conservative justices by name. Threaten their persons by warning that because they sowed the “wind” they would soon reap the “whirlwind” and thus had no idea what would “hit” them. Have mobs surround their houses and violate—with impunity—all federal laws prohibiting such intimidation of justices. In fact, ignore the law entirely and let anyone scream 24/7 outside the incorrect justice’s home.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/donald-trump-enemies-everywhere-jared-kushner-peter-navarro/

I think that Michael Anton is correct that “the people who really run the United States of America have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again.”

“The people who really run the United States”: that would be denizens of the Swamp, the bureaucratic elite, their media and academic mouthpieces, worker bees in the ambient welfare jelly and the nomenklatura who win elections and circulate in and out of the corridors of power.

It’s a powerful, nearly monolithic force, a monument to special privilege and two-tier justice — and the prospect of dismantling it is daunting to say the least. The fact that Donald Trump, from the moment he sailed down the elevator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy in 2015, managed to open a bleeding fissure in that smug consensus shows why the ruling class considers him so dangerous. One man, almost without allies, inexperienced in the ways of the Swamp, dependent at every turn on ambassadors and front men from the very thing he had campaigned to destroy: how much damage could he really do?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-warrant-had-no-legal-basis-mar-a-lago-affidavit-presidential-records-act-archivist-custody-classified-fbi-garland-11661170684

Was the Federal Bureau of Investigation justified in searching Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago? The judge who issued the warrant for Mar-a-Lago has signaled that he is likely to release a redacted version of the affidavit supporting it. But the warrant itself suggests the answer is likely no—the FBI had no legally valid cause for the raid.

The warrant authorized the FBI to seize “all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§793, 2071, or 1519” (emphasis added). These three criminal statutes all address the possession and handling of materials that contain national-security information, public records or material relevant to an investigation or other matters properly before a federal agency or the courts.

The materials to be seized included “any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021”—i.e., during Mr. Trump’s term of office. Virtually all the materials at Mar-a-Lago are likely to fall within this category. Federal law gives Mr. Trump a right of access to them. His possession of them is entirely consistent with that right, and therefore lawful, regardless of the statutes the FBI cites in its warrant.

Those statutes are general in their text and application. But Mr. Trump’s documents are covered by a specific statute, the Presidential Records Act of 1978. It has long been the Supreme Court position, as stated in Morton v. Mancari (1974), that “where there is no clear intention otherwise, a specific statute will not be controlled or nullified by a general one, regardless of the priority of enactment.” The former president’s rights under the PRA trump any application of the laws the FBI warrant cites.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/liz_cheneys_agony.html

EXCERPT

Liz Cheney, who sits on the Jan. 6th Committee, has made her political agenda clear from the beginning.  Although an “investigation” is supposed to be a search for the truth, Liz Cheney made agonizingly clear many times that she didn’t need to wait for the results of the investigation.  From the beginning her stated aim was “make sure that Trump never gets near the White House again.”  Permanent Washington also made their aim clear.  The Jan. 6th Committee “investigation” was for her, and many others, mere political theatre to achieve a predetermined political agenda.

Had Cheney been interested in the truth, she might have insisted that the committee seat the appropriate number and type of Republicans to cross-examine the prosecutorial witnesses.  She did not do so.  At every turn she interpreted any testimony in the worst way possible for Trump, e.g., she has recently stated that Trump “commanded” a “heavily armed mob” to try to stop the counting of electoral votes.  She and her Jan. 6th Committee have, however, given no evidence whatsoever that Trump “commanded” an armed mob to use violence to stop the counting of electoral votes.  Her very strong statement requires that she prove both causality and intent.  However, the committee has only demonstrated a degree (even that not clear) of correlation between Trump’s remarks and the riot, namely, that Trump made some remarks and some people went to the Capitol and rioted.  The committee has not proved that Trump’s remarks caused the mob to riot at the Capitol or that Trump intended that his remarks cause the mob to riot at the Capitol.  Demonstrating causality or intent is never easy in social situations: “Since intent is a mental state. it is one of the most difficult things to prove.” It is certainly not easy given the very murky events surrounding Jan. 6th, events that the committee in their “Star Chamber” has conspired to keep murky.  For Liz Cheney, however, everything about Jan. 6th is as clear to her as her seething hatred of Donald Trump.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/08/18/fbi_unit_leading_mar-a-lago_probe_previously_led_russiagate_hoax_848582.html

The FBI division overseeing the investigation of former President Trump’s handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago residence is also a focus of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation of the bureau’s alleged abuses of power and political bias during its years-long Russiagate probe of Trump.

The FBI’s nine-hour, 30-agent raid of the former president’s Florida estate is part of a counterintelligence case run out of Washington – not Miami, as has been widely reported – according to FBI case documents and sources with knowledge of the matter. The bureau’s counterintelligence division led the 2016-2017 Russia “collusion” investigation of Trump, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”

Although the former head of Crossfire Hurricane, Peter Strzok, was fired after the disclosure of his vitriolic anti-Trump tweets, several members of his team remain working in the counterintelligence unit, the sources say, even though they are under active investigation by both Durham and the bureau’s disciplinary arm, the Office of Professional Responsibility. The FBI declined to respond to questions about any role they may be taking in the Mar-a-Lago case.

In addition, a key member of the Crossfire team – Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten – has continued to be involved in politically sensitive investigations, including the ongoing federal probe of potentially incriminating content found on the abandoned laptop of President Biden’s son Hunter Biden, according to recent correspondence between the Senate Judiciary Committee and FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI whistleblowers have alleged that Auten tried to falsely discredit derogatory evidence against Hunter Biden during the 2020 campaign by labeling it Russian “disinformation,” an assessment that caused investigative activity to cease.

Auten has been allowed to work on sensitive cases even though he has been under internal investigation since 2019, when Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz referred him for disciplinary review for his role in vetting a Hillary Clinton campaign-funded dossier used by the FBI to obtain a series of wiretap warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Horowitz singled out Auten for cutting a number of corners in the verification process and even allowing information he knew to be incorrect slip into warrant affidavits and mislead the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.