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Showing posts with label Grassley. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 12, 2019

The Deep State Was In Hillary's Corner, Records Show

DOJ Emails Show Clinton Pressured FBI on Weiner Laptop

By TFPP Wire
February 12, 2019 at 6:45am

Judicial Watch announced today it received 215 pages of records from the U.S. Department of Justice revealing former FBI General Counsel James Baker discussed the investigation of Clinton-related emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop with Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall. Baker then forwarded the conversation to his FBI colleagues.

The documents also further describe a previously reported quid pro quo from the Obama State Department offering the FBI more legal attaché positions if it would downgrade a redaction in an email found during the Hillary Clinton email investigation “from classified to something else.”

The newly obtained emails came in response to a May 21 order in a January 2018 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed after the DOJ failed to respond to a December 4, 2017 FOIA request (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:18-cv-00154)). Judicial Watch seeks:

All records of communications, including but not limited to, emails, text messages and instant chats, between FBI official Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page;
All travel requests, travel authorizations, travel vouchers and expense reports of Peter Strzok.
All travel requests, travel authorizations, travel vouchers and expense reports of Lisa Page.
On October 28, 2016, the day that Comey sent a letter to Congress regarding the FBI’s discovery that the Weiner laptop contained Clinton’s emails. Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer David Kendall, within hours, emails Baker requesting a call “ASAP” about the Comey letter. Baker describes his follow-up call to senior FBI officials:

I received the email below from David Kendall and I called him back. Before doing so I alerted DOJ via email that I would do that.

[Redacted paragraph]

He said that our letter was “tantalizingly ambiguous” and made statements that were “inchoate and highly ominous” such that what we had done was worse than transparency because it allows people to make whatever they want out to make out of the letter to the prejudice of Secretary Clinton.

I told him that I could not respond to his requests at this time but that I would discuss it with others and get back to him.

I suggest that we have some kind of follow up meeting or phone call with this group either this evening or over the weekend to address this and probably other issues/questions that come up in the next 24 hours. Sound reasonable?

Baker’s heads up on the Kendall call was sent to:
Then-Director James Comey; since fired;
Then-Associate Deputy Director David Bowdich, who later replaced Andrew McCabe as deputy director;
Michael Steinbach, the F.B.I.’s former executive assistant director for national security;
Then-Assistant Director of Counterintelligence E.W. Priestap, now retired;
James Rybicki, former chief of staff to Comey;
FBI intelligence analyst Jonathan Moffa;
Former Acting Assistant Director Jason V. Herring;
Michael Kortan, FBI assistant director for public affairs, now retired;
Former principal deputy general counsel Trisha Anderson;
Strzok and Page

The emails show that a conference call for the above senior officials was set up for the next day by Peter Strzok. (Two days before the election, on November 6, Comey sent a second letter reporting that the FBI’s review of the Weiner laptop material would not change his “conclusion” that Hillary Clinton should not be prosecuted.)

On October 13, 2016, former FBI attorney Lisa Page sent an email, which apparently references a related Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit and further discusses a previously reported quid pro quo offer from the State Department:

Jason Herring will be providing you with three 302s of current and former FBI employees who were interviewed during the course of the Clinton investigation. These 302s are scheduled to be released to Congress in an unredacted form at the end of the week, and produced (with redactions) pursuant to FOIA at the beginning of next week. As you will see, they describe a discussion about potential quid pro quo arrangement between then-DAD in IOD [deputy assistant director in International Operations Division] and an Undersecretary at the State Department whereby IOD would get more LEGAT [legal attaché] positions if the FBI could change the basis of the FOIA withhold re a Clinton email from classified to something else. [Emphasis added]

The lawsuit also forced the release of a November 6, 2016, email by then-FBI official Peter Strzok telling Bowdich, Priestap, Rybicki, Page, former FBI General Counsel James Baker and others: “[Redacted], Jon and I completed our review of all of the potential HRC work emails on the [Anthony Weiner] laptop. We found no previously unknown, potentially classified emails on the media.”

As Judicial Watch previously reported, there were at least 18 classified emails found on the Weiner laptop by the FBI. Paul Sperry’s RealClear Investigations report revealed that only 3,077 of the 340,000 emails “were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information.”

The new records also include a September 2, 2016, email that Comey forwards containing a press release issued that day by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), in which Grassley criticized the FBI for not publicly releasing many unclassified records related to the Clinton email-server investigation, as demanded by Congress. In his cover note responding to Grassley’s charge, Comey tells his top aides, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” Page then responds with, “Outstanding.”

On October 23, 2016, Strzok forwarded to Page and others the Wall Street Journal article revealing that Andrew McCabe’s wife had received a half million dollars for her Democratic state senate campaign. Page responded that the article, “shaded or omitted or mischaracterized” facts “in order to get out the story [the reporter] wanted to tell.” She claimed the WSJ story was just “another depressing chapter in this whole post-investigation saga.”

“It is big news that, just days before the presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer pressured the top lawyer for the FBI on the infamous Weiner laptop emails,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These documents further underscore that the fix was in for Hillary Clinton. When will the Justice Department and FBI finally do an honest investigation of the Clinton email scandal?”

Last month, United States District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that discovery can begin in Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides will now be deposed under oath. Senior officials — including Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, and FBI official E.W. Priestap — will now have to answer Judicial Watch’s written questions under oath. The court rejected the DOJ and State Department’s objections to Judicial Watch’s court-ordered discovery plan. (The court, in ordering a discovery plan last month, ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”)

Judicial Watch’s discovery will seek answers to:

Whether Clinton intentionally attempted to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by using a non-government email system;
whether the State Department’s efforts to settle this case beginning in late 2014 amounted to bad faith; and
whether the State Department adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s FOIA request.

The preceding was a press release from Judicial Watch.

Friday, November 9, 2018

Blasey Ford Affair Is A Cluster

Senator Chuck Grassley Reports Kavanaugh Liars for Prosecution

While the House may be spinning its wheels for a while since Tuesday night’s mid-term elections, the Senate is primed to ensure that Justice Brett Kavanaugh gets his life back.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released the committee’s report that confirms what we all already knew: there “was no credible evidence to support the allegations against Kavanaugh”

Less than a month ago Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, along with multiple outrageous sexual assault allegations against him, dominated the 24/7 news cycle but ever since the swearing in any updates to this story have largely gone unreported.

The Daily Wire commented that the report shows that the committee “spoke with 45 individuals and took 25 written statements relating to the various allegations made in the course of the Supreme Court confirmation process.”

Grassley was complimentary of the FBI investigation ordered by the committee that led to no “evidence to substantiate or corroborate any of the allegations.”

But the committee didn’t just exonerate Kavanaugh, it set in motion a reckoning for witnesses who gave false statements and otherwise attempted to manipulate the hearings.

The committee notes that it has submitted a number of people to the Justice Department for review for “potential violations of Senate rules, potential witness tampering, and potentially false statements made to the Committee in violation of federal law,” including creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti, and Kavanaugh-accusers Julie Swetnick and Judy Munro-Leighton.

Part of the report states, “All interviews were conducted in an objective and fair manner aimed at producing a final determination of fact with respect to the allegations levied against Justice Kavanaugh. In order to accomplish that, investigators conducted extensive interviews with individuals who knew Justice Kavanaugh in high school and college; investigators also conducted extensive interviews with individuals who knew the accusers in order to better weigh the credibility of their allegations. In sum, the Committee spoke to 45 individuals and collected 25 written statements.”

Regarding Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s initial claims of sexual misconduct the committee contacted every person she claimed as witnesses – Mark Judge, Patrick J. (P.J.) Smyth, and Leland Keyser – along with 14 of Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s former classmates.

After interviewing all 17 people the committee found that “None of them had any knowledge of the conduct alleged against Justice Kavanaugh by Dr. Ford or of the gathering at which she claimed to have been assaulted,” the committee underscores.”

As many suspected, it now appears that Ford has proven to be not so reliable a witness as first presented.

Grassley’s report also exposed an inconsistency in Ford’s testimony that had been previously unknown concerning the alleged sexual assault. During the hearings, Ford testified that the main effect of Kavanaugh’s purported assault happened during “the initial four years after the event.”

Since Ford claimed the attacked happened in 1982, the main effect she spoke of would have been between 1982 and 1986. She expanded on the effects, saying: “I struggled academically. I struggled very much in Chapel Hill and in college. When I was 17 and went off to college, I had a very hard time, more so than others, forming new friendships and especially friendships with boys, and I had academic problems.”

A former college acquaintance of Ford’s told the Judiciary Committee he has a far different remembrance of her during that time period. Ford’s testimony under oath was that the attack left her “introverted and unable to relate to other men at college. Her male college friend told the committee that Ford had “a fairly active and robust social life” in college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In a letter to the committee, he added that Ford “seemed to have … more guy friends perhaps than females,” and that she attended “frat house parties, some crowded and lasting very late in the evening.” He also directly contradicted her claim to “be afraid to be in rooms or apartments with only one entrance.”

The biggest takeaway from the report is that it is just the starting point that may lead to indictments over the months to come.

Grassley said, “Committee investigators will refer for investigation by the Justice Department and FBI any potential violations of federal law, when warranted. These referrals will identify individuals who appear to have made materially false statements … otherwise obstructed the Committee’s investigation.”

Voters tend to have a short memory so hopefully, this report will remind them of how low Democrats were willing to go to torpedo an innocent man’s life. There is no low too low for Democrats in their fight against President Trump and in their quest for power over America.

Saturday, November 3, 2018

Another Lie Regarding Kavanaugh Shown To Be A Fraud.

Kavanaugh Accuser Admits She Never Met Him, Allegations Were Made Up

By Randy DeSoto
November 2, 2018 at 6:58pm

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has referred another person to the Justice Department for criminal investigation regarding apparent false allegations during the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

In a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray on Friday, Grassley recounted that the Committee reached out to numerous individuals claiming to have relevant information as part of the process of investigating allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against Kavanaugh.

“While many of those individuals have provided the Committee information in good faith, it unfortunately appears some have not,” wrote the senator.

He referred Judy Munro-Leighton for investigation of potential violations of providing materially false statements and obstruction of the committee’s investigation regarding Kavanaugh.

Grassley explained that staff members for Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California submitted “an undated handwritten letter to committee investigators that her California office had received signed under the alias “Jane Doe from Oceanside, California.”

“The anonymous accuser alleged that Justice Kavanaugh and a friend had raped her ‘several times each’ in the backseat of a car. In addition to being from an anonymous accuser, the letter listed no return address, failed to provide any timeframe, and failed to provide any location — beyond an automobile — in which these alleged incidents took place,” wrote the chairman.

Committee staff questioned Kavanaugh about the allegations in late September.

“(T)he whole thing is ridiculous. Nothing ever — anything like that, nothing,” the then-nominee responded. “(T)he whole thing is just a crock, farce, wrong, didn’t happen, not anything close.”

The committee later released the transcript of the interview publicly.

Do you think Munro-Leighton should be criminally prosecuted?

Three days before Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote, Judy Munro-Leighton wrote an email to the committee claiming, “I am Jane Doe from Oceanside CA — Kavanaugh raped me.”

Munro-Leighton further related that she was “sharing with you the story of the night that Brett Kavanaugh and his friend sexually assaulted and raped me in his car” and referred to “the letter that I sent to Sen. Kamala Harris on Sept. 19 with details of this vicious assault.”

Committee investigators then looked into Munro-Leighton’s background and learned she is a “left-wing activist,” who is decades older than Judge Kavanaugh and lived in “neither the Washington DC area nor California, but in Kentucky.”

Under questioning by the committee, Munro-Leighton admitted she did not write the Jane Doe letter and that she “just wanted to get attention,” and her actions were a “tactic” and a “ploy” because she opposed Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

“She told Committee investigators that she had called Congress multiple times during the Kavanaugh hearing process – including prior to the time Dr. Ford’s allegations surfaced – to oppose his nomination,” wrote Grassley.

Munro-Leighton revealed that she had never even met Kavanaugh.

Grassley concluded his letter to the DOJ, “(I)n light of the seriousness of these facts, and the threat these types of actions pose to the Committee’s ability to perform its constitutional duties, I hope you will give this referral the utmost consideration.”

Last week, the senator referred attorney Michael Avenatti and his client Julie Swetnick to the DOJ for criminal investigation relating to a “potential conspiracy to provide materially false statements to Congress.”

A news release from the Judiciary Committee highlighted that Swetnick’s allegations about Kavanaugh, made in a sworn statement to the committee, had “serious credibility problems.” Swetnick claimed Kavanaugh was present at parties when there were gang rapes and that he was involved in spiking punch to make women more susceptible to sexual advances.

“In an October 1 interview with NBC News … Swetnick specifically and explicitly back-tracked or contradicted key parts of her sworn statement on these and other allegations,” the release stated. “In subsequent interviews, Avenatti likewise cast serious doubt on or contradicted the allegations while insisting that he had thoroughly vetted his client.”

Following Grassley’s announcement of the criminal referral, NBC published a storynoting that not only had the network not been able to corroborate Swetnick’s initial claims, but it “found other apparent inconsistencies in a second sworn statement from another woman whose statement Avenatti provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee in a bid to bolster Swetnick’s claims.”

Based on this reporting, Grassley made a second referral to the DOJ regarding Avenatti.

Obama Corrupted CIA As Well As The Rest Of The Government

Chuck Grassley uncovers HUGE Obama bombshell (shocking!)

NOVEMBER 3, 2018

“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes

Americans are just days away from deciding whether to give Democrats a new lease on political life—but they might want to think about how the liberals will abuse the power and authority once they crawl their way back into office.

An explosive new discovery shows just how deep corruption ran the last time Democrats ran the show… and it’s uglier than we ever thought.

A new report has surfaced explaining that former President Barack Obama actually spied on Congress so he could punish the whistleblowers who warned them about Obama’s ‘Big

Investigators finally revealed on Monday that the Obama administration secretly stole communications sent to congressional staffers from CIA whistleblowers—people sounding the alarm that the Obama administration had been abusing the nation’s top spy organization.

“The fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading congressional staff’s e-mails about intelligence community whistleblowers raises serious policy concerns, as well as potential constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly,” said Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Nothing—nothing—should inhibit or interfere with Congress’s constitutional job and protecting whistleblowers,” Grassley said.

The new documents are smoking hot—but they didn’t come overnight. Sen. Grassley had to fight the Deep State tooth and nail for more than four years to blow the lid off the program.

Grassley first asked for memos about Obama illegally spying on Congress in April of 2014.

The Iowa Republican said that he had to fight years of “bureaucratic foot dragging” from two top Obama officials… and he named names.

James Clapper, Obama’s National Intelligence Director, and John Brennan, a one-time Communist Party voter who Obama tapped to be his CIA Director, kept everything under wraps, according to the Senate leader.

Even the people who were supposed to hold Obama accountable did nothing but whitewash his crimes and misdemeanors.

The inspector general, I. Charles McCullough III, called Obama’s spying on Congress “lawful and justified.”

Obama-era officials said the surveillance was totally innocent, and they only picked up Congressional e-mails during “routine counterintelligence (CI) monitoring of government computer systems.”

Obama violated the Constitution and spied on every single, living American. Then he monitored Congress, so that he could punish people who warned the people what he was up to.

But he claims there’s nothing to see here, move along!

Grassley followed up in 2017, but the Deep State kept on stonewalling him… even under President Donald Trump.

But Trump appointed a new inspector general, Michael K. Atkinson, in May — and he’s shutting down Obama’s conspiracy of silence.

Grassley got through to the right person last month — and the documents that finally came out showed how Obama would stop at nothing to pry into your privacy without you ever finding out.

He turned the country into one huge spy ring — and nobody was exempt… Congress, the CIA, private citizens, presidential candidates, nobody.

He put at least one spy in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Obama’s NSA spied on the entire country.

“Americans should be alarmed that the NSA is vacuuming up their emails and phone calls without a warrant,” the ACLU said about the Obama-era NSA just last year.

To keep the government’s all-seeing eye open, Obama put the screws to anyone who tried to warn the country about what he was doing.

Obama prosecuted nine whistleblowers for leaking information — three times as many as all other U.S. presidents combined.

Those dangerous forces got sent up the river for reporting on Obama’s dirty, secret spy programs to outlets like Fox News and the conservative Hoover Institute.

Obama didn’t care that these people leaked “national secrets”… after all, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s homebrew e-mail server leaked top-secret documents like a sieve.

Obama didn’t care when China or Russia got U.S. secrets — only when his employees told the conservative media just how stupid, hapless, and unconstitutional Obama really was.

That had to be shut down… no matter how badly it hurt the government or the country.

Grassley said Obama’s actions were “unacceptable and unpatriotic,” because they could stop “responsible citizens from disclosing waste, fraud and abuse in our government.”

“Blowing the whistle has played an integral role in maintaining good government,” Sen. Grassley said.

But shutting people up about massive government abuse is exactly what Obama intended — and if Hillary had been elected, we still wouldn’t know any of this.

If Democrats end up back in power, everything you do goes back under the government microscope. Everything the government does gets swept back under the rug. And the Constitution goes back into the shredder.

Frank Holmes is a reporter for The Horn News. He is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”