Washington Examiner

In front of a joint session of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees on Aug. 31, 2018, former FBI Deputy General Counsel Trisha Anderson said she was normally responsible for signing off on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications before they reached the desk of her superiors for approval. Anderson said the “linear path” those applications typically take was upended in October 2016, with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates signing off on the application before she did. Because of that unusual high-level involvement, she didn’t see the need to “second guess” the FISA application.

So what is the takeaway here? Well, first, the FISA application clearly followed an unusual, top-down, very much not "by the book", dare I say political process. By the time it reached Trisha Anderson's desk, who would normally see it first, it had already been approved "informally" by McCabe and Sally Yates had already signed it.

McCabe is infamous for his pro-Hillary involvement in the Hillary email investigation, and for this anti-Trump involvement in the Trump investigation, and also for the $500,000+ in campaign donations his wife received from Hillary-linked donors while all this was going on.

Yates is infamous for getting herself fired over a relatively trivial policy position during the early Trump administration. It suffices to establish her anti-Trump bias.

Anderson clearly admits she didn't do her job to review the FISA because her superiors had already signed off on it.

Second point. Remember Susan Rice's last minute email to herself saying Obama said to do it all "by the book"? This is the last firewall before this scandal reaches Obama. "He said to do it all by the book!" This is clearly not by the book.

Third... whether we believe her that she didn't look at the application or not, she signed off on it. That makes her complicit. It's not the informal approvals that matter. It's her signature.

She tracks the start of the investigations into Trump to spring of 2016 rather than the summer of 2016 when Papadopoulos spoke with Downer. She says it started with Page instead.

I'm not sure he's right. Here's what the Constitution says:

US Constitution

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

What they did is probably not "levying war". "Adhering to their Enemies" is a bit trickier. Steele is British; is he an enemy? Steele's alleged sources were Russian; they are definitely Enemy-ish. Ukraine was involved too, and Australia. Aid and Comfort, sure, that's easy enough. Does Hillary Clinton count as an "Enemy" if she is trying to overturn the government, or is that more of a nation-state designation?

It might be easier to pin some kind of rebellion or insurrection charge, or just nail them all for wiretapping and abuse of civil rights under color of law.

Under common English, however, treason would be an appropriate charge for trying to overthrow the government illegally.

Breitbart

Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kevin McAleenan confirmed to Congress this week that his agency is merely acting as a checkpoint for adults crossing the United States-Mexico border with children, as “100 percent” are being released into the interior of the country.

During a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, McAleenan said DHS is releasing “100 percent” of adult border crossers into the interior of the country who arrive with children at the southern border, including those who are not even asking for asylum.

Then, within four to six weeks, McAleenan said the adult border crossers who have been released into the U.S. are given work permits allowing them to take American jobs while they await their court hearings, oftentimes two years down the road.

This is a complete disaster, and effectively no border at all. The invaders are deliberately overwhelming the system.

Daily Caller

A Russian-British academic is suing FBI informant Stefan Halper for defamation over what she claims is a conspiracy to smear her and former national security adviser Michael Flynn through the media, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday.

The academic, Svetlana Lokhova, is also suing several news organizations she accuses of publishing false information provided by Halper, a former Cambridge professor.

Important side point: Halper was the one who invited her and seated her next to Flynn. Halper was also the one who reported Flynn's interactions with her as suspicious. That smells like a setup to me.

It's all about "Chelsea" Manning. If the Russians were behind the DNC hack and released those emails through Wikileaks, why wasn't Assange charged with any of that?

Sara Carter

President Donald Trump directed the intelligence community Thursday to “quickly and fully cooperate” with Department of Justice Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into surveillance activities during the 2016 presidential election, said White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders.

“Today, at the request and recommendation of the Attorney General of the United States, President Donald J. Trump directed the intelligence community to quickly and fully cooperate with the Attorney General’s investigation into surveillance activities during the 2016 Presidential election,” said Sanders in a statement released late Thursday. “The Attorney General has also been delegated full and complete authority to declassify information pertaining to this investigation, in accordance with the long established standards for handling classified information.”

“Today’s action will help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred, and the actions that were taken, during the last Presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions.”

Declassification of the material involved here will, finally, reveal the truth that nearly 4 years of hoaxes, intelligence abuses, spy games, and, yes, obstruction of justice have tried to conceal.

The people who abused our intelligence agencies must be held accountable. All the way to the top.

Reason

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) has taken a radical turn in a few of its recent social media postings, winking at the idea of airline workers executing their bosses and encouraging the proletariat to literally seize the means of production.

Yesterday, the AFL-CIO tweeted out an explainer video from self-described "anti-capitalist, worker-owned" streaming platform Means TV featuring Dan Whelan, identified as a "Marxist, roofer", explaining that the middle class is actually an illusion spread by the owners of society to divide the working class.

So, yes, the unions are now openly communist.

Twitchy quoting CBS in Dallas-Fort-Worth

A Dallas man previously arrested in the death of an 81-year-old woman has been charged with killing at least 11 more elderly women whose jewelry and other valuables he stole, authorities said Thursday.

The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office, said 46-year-old Billy Chemirmir was indicted Tuesday on six more counts of capital murder in the deaths of women ranging in age from 76 to 94.

Chemirmir, a Kenyan citizen who was living in the U.S. illegally, also is charged in nearby Collin County with two counts of attempted capital murder for similar attacks there, according to county court records.

They are reviewing 750 unattended deaths for possible links to the same person. More than seven hundred possible victims.

Lisa Page
Sara Carter Analysis
Bruce Ohr
Nellie Ohr (Analyzed at Epoch Times) (Further Analysis at CTH)
Full testimony of Bill Priestap
Peter Strzok
James Baker Part 1
James Baker Part 2
George Papadopoulos
Additional witnesses

John Solomon says it to Hannity, starting with "Bucket Five". As a bonus, there's a poll saying over 60% of the public support naming a prosecutor to investigate whether regulations were violated to spy on Trump.

UPDATE: Oops. Poll results were misread a bit. 64% believe the FBI knew the dossier was unreliable when they used it to get a FISA warrant. 49% favor a DOJ investigation into illegal spying on the Trump campaign. 64% of Republicans support an investigation.

Comeys says Lynch told him to call the Clinton email investigation a "matter". Lynch says she did not. One of them is lying. Both were under oath.

They went after Flynn for less even after their own interviewers said they didn't think he was lying. One of those two is lying to support a cover up. Apply the Flynn standard. Prosecute, convict, imprison.

National Review

If dossier claims were still unverified when Comey testified to Congress in mid 2017 (and thereafter), then those claims could not have been verified when the Obama Justice Department and FBI submitted it to the FISC as a “VERIFIED APPLICATION” in October 2016. It also had to have been unverified on January 6, 2017, when the Obama administration chose to include a sliver of the dossier in the briefing of President-elect Trump — the day after intelligence chiefs met with President Obama in the Oval Office and discussed what Russia information should be shared with the incoming Trump team.

Moreover, FBI and Justice Department procedures require that information be vetted for factual accuracy before it is submitted to the FISC. The rules of the FISC require the Justice Department to notify the court promptly if misstatements or inaccuracies have been discovered. Far from alerting the FISC that information in what it boldly labeled the “VERIFIED APPLICATION” was actually unverified, the Justice Department and the FBI kept reaffirming the dossier allegations to the court — in January, April, and June of 2017.

The thing is, claiming that you verified something you didn't in court documents... that tends to be called perjury.

Sara Carter

George Papadopoulos said to Laura Ingraham on Thursday that the FBI tried to get his wife to wear a wire to “entrap” him. He also said that Congress “probably has transcripts” of meetings he had that would prove he was spied on by the FBI.

Papadopoulos believes his wife was targeted because she knew all about academic Joseph Mifsud’s connection to Italian government.

“But what we believed that they really targeted her for is, we believe she knew all about Joseph Mifsud’s connections to the Italian government and his connections in Europe, which we just found out today that … the prime minister … just fired the heads of three intel agencies in Italy. And I think it has to do with the person, Joseph Mifsud, who the president and Devin Nunes and other people have been asking the government in Italy to examine a lot more because he’s actually at the core of this entire scam,” Papadopoulos said.

Even if it's entirely legal, trying to get to someone through their wife is a really scummy move.

Of Arms and the Law has more details. This one is for the people who fantasize that if only the government will confiscate all the guns, then only the government will have all the guns. Of course it's not that simple. It's never that simple.

Daily Mail

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement pilot of new rapid DNA testing at the border has found that nearly a third of those tested were not biologically related to the children in their custody.

ICE conducted the pilot for a few days earlier this month in El Paso and McAllen, Texas, finding about 30 per cent of those tested were not related to the children they claimed were their own, an official told the Washington Examiner.

The official said that these were not cases of step-fathers or adoptive parents.

'Those were not the case. In these cases, they are misrepresented as family members,' the official said.

Sounds like that's an easy way to dispose of a third of the asylum claims. Ask if they are related to the children they are with. Test them. If they lie, send them home -- and put them in the identity database so next time you don't even have to bother.

Free Beacon

Fires at Jewish centers in Massachusetts were deliberately set, authorities now believe. Two were an hour apart, and two struck one house the same week.

Police responded to reports of fires two Massachusetts cities Thursday night. One, at a Chabad rabbi's home in Arlington, burned for less than a minute before police responded to put out the flames.

The current Democratic party is showing a disturbing trend towards antisemitism. I don't want to say that this is the result, but the Overton window has certainly been shifted by it.

New York Magazine (from 2003)

“In college, I was left of center, and through a gradual process I found myself more comfortable with a lot of the ideas and approaches the Republicans were using.” He voted for Carter in 1980, but in ’84, “I voted for Reagan—I’d moved from Communist to whatever I am now. I’m not even sure how to characterize myself politically. Maybe at some point, I’ll have to figure it out.”

No, a literal Communist. His own words.

Here's the thing. He describes himself as a Commmunist. He admits voting for Carter. And then he switches to Reagan. But that doesn't make him a true believer; it makes him someone who realized being a Communist was bad for his career. Identifying as a Republican means he gets all the Deep State jobs where they need a Republican who is...reliable.

And remember, Obama's pick for CIA, Brennan, was... also a Communist. Voted for their candidate back in the day, before he went undercover. Just like Comey. It's not really a surprise that two "ex"-Communists would conspire to overthrow a legitimate President.

Conservative Review

The latest report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission demonstrates that the 800-pound gorilla in the room clogging up the federal criminal justice system is immigration, not “low-level” domestic offenders.

If we only solved our border problem and deported illegal aliens before they commit more crimes, not only would we be safer, but we’d save a ton of money on the federal criminal justice system – without irresponsibly releasing American criminals back into our communities, as proposed by jailbreak proponents.

According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, in its recently published 2018 report on federal sentencing statistics, 54.3 percent of the 69,425 federal offenders last year were Hispanic, and 42.7 percent of offenders were non-citizens. The two biggest offense categories were immigration (34.4 percent) and drugs (28.1 percent).

This is somewhat circular but the point is still valid. The counterpoints: federal crimes don't include local or state crimes, which are the majority of criminal activity, especially violence, and of course, being in the country illegally is a crime and one of the few crimes that fall under federal jurisdiction and are commonly committed.

The core point does stand, though. Illegal aliens are a large burden on our justice system, and deporting them rather than allowing them to remain in the country tying up the court system with frivolous asylum claims and court dates they don't bother to show up for would save us a lot of trouble.

Washington Examiner

Nellie Ohr, the wife of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, told her husband she was deleting emails sent from his government account.

The revelation comes as both Ohrs remain under intense scrutiny for their ties to Fusion GPS and British ex-spy Christopher Steele, the author of the anti-Trump dossier that was used to obtain warrants to wiretap a member of President Trump's 2016 campaign.

Sounds like a coverup, doesn't it?

It appears, from their press reports, that they helped the spying operation on Trump and are now being told to fall on their swords.

The Kavalec email describing flaws in Steele's dossier went directly to Strzok well before the FISA warrant application was submitted. That means Strzok knew Steele's story had massive holes -- the most obvious being the routing of payments through a nonexistent Russian consulate in Miami.

Daily Caller

The FBI has uncovered a homegrown, jihadist compound in Macon County, Alabama.

The FBI‘s search warrant described the property as a “makeshift military-style obstacle course” in a story first reported by Sinclair Broadcast Group. The land where the group gathered reportedly looked like an “abandoned dump,” and was led by Siraj Wahhaj, who allegedly trained children to commit school shootings in a similar terrorist breeding ground in New Mexico last year.

Make no mistake, these terror camps are intended to produce terrorists. If we've found two there are likely more.

For what it's worth, on the scary scale, the indoctrination factor of being isolated in a controlled environment is probably worse than any skills they could be teaching. Firearms instruction is perfectly legal and gas is cheap. The missing ingredient to manufacture a terrorist is the desire to kill infidels for the glory of their twisted god of murder.

Hot Air

Google provides a significant percentage of the incoming traffic which many news sites get, but the algorithms that determine which sites get that traffic are proprietary and not widely understood. Academics at Northwestern University decided to attempt to quantify how those algorithms work by looking closely at search results for news related queries for one specific month, November 2017. The researchers identified 200 search terms related to hard news events and then ran those terms once for each minute of each day. What they found after collecting all of this data is that Google’s top story search results are concentrated on a small handful of major outlets.

If you exclude the 26% that isn’t rated, the ratio of news that appears in Google search results leans left by more than 5:1. But CJR points out that this result may be skewed by the fact that there are more left-leaning sites than right-leaning ones overall. However, even if you account for this, it appears Google’s algorithm is still tilting the results to the left.

Of course it is. Algorithms are developed by people, trained by people, and given manual tuning input by people. And the people working at Google are so far to the left they don't even know how reproductive sex works. We'll be fine, if we can just survive the current idiots.

Details here. There are good technical arguments the data was leaked rather than hacked, even if you discount what Wikileaks says about how they got the data. Who exactly did the leaking is still an open question.

DOJ is of course saying they don;'t have to prove anything about the supposed "hack", they can just charge Stone with somehow being an accessory or conspiring to do something that they haven't proven was a crime.