Posted by Jack
As Wednesday’s explosive Michael Cohen hearing illustrated, a number of Clinton–Obama figures have been instigators in the Justice Department‘s 33-month-long Russia probe of President Trump and his family.
Attorney Lanny Davis sat behind former Trump attorney Cohen, whispering in his ear during his accusation-filled House testimony. Mr. Davis, Cohen’s closest adviser, is a consummate Bill and Hillary Clinton loyalist, having served as their counsel and spokesman. He has been a source for anti-Trump news stories. His book, “The Unmaking of the President 2016,” calls for Congress to remove the president.
Mr. Davis is not alone among Clinton–Obama supporters working to oust Mr. Trump, some in the shadows. They have operated at the Justice Department and in political operations, as well as in opposition research, public relations and law firms.
“The ‘deep state’ are Obama–Clinton partisans,” said Tom Fitton, who directs the conservative investigative group Judicial Watch.
Clinton and Obama supporters started and sustained Trump-Russia collusion theories. Their centerpiece is the anti-Trump dossier funded by Mrs. Clinton‘s campaign and the Democratic Party. Its conspiracy charges fueled much of the collusion talk from Rep. Adam Schiff, California Democrat and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who continues his hunt today.
“Today a convicted liar sponsored by Lanny Davis illustrates the heart of the dossier,” John Dowd, Mr. Trump‘s former defense attorney, told The Washington Times. “The truth is irrelevant as Schiff so ably demonstrated by reading it into the record in 2017.”
Two fiery Trump opponents/Clinton supporters — FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI counsel Lisa Page — orchestrated the Russia probe in the summer of 2016.
Another pro-Hillary Clinton insider, Justice Department lawyer Bruce Ohr, became the agent for Mrs. Clinton‘s opposition research army. During the campaign and after, Mr. Ohr ferried their allegations directly to the FBI hierarchy, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Mr. Strzok.
Two key warriors on the staff of special counsel Robert Mueller are Clinton supporters: Andrew Weissmann is a Democratic Party donor who attended what was supposed to be Mrs. Clinton‘s victory party in New York. Jeannie Rhee has represented Mrs. Clinton and her billion-dollar family foundation.
Another senior prosecutor, Andrew D. Goldstein, contributed to Barack Obama‘s presidential campaign. Mr. Goldstein worked in Manhattan under then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, an Obama appointee and a protege of Sen. Charles Schumer, New York Democrat.
Mr. Goldstein contributed $2,550 to Mr. Obama in 2008, according to federal records. In 2012, while an assistant U.S. attorney in New York, he gave $750 to Mr. Obama‘s reelection.
Mr. Bharara, whom Mr. Trump fired as U.S. attorney in Manhattan, has become a Twitter cheerleader for his legacy team of prosecutors investigating the president in the Justice Department‘s Southern District of New York.
⦁ Mrs. Clinton‘s opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, orchestrated the infamous Christopher Steele dossier. It alleged a series of felony charges against Mr. Trump and his people. Clinton operatives sought to directly influence the State Department, the Justice Department and the FBI.
No dossier charge has been proven publicly. Republicans call it a hoax.
⦁ According to an FBI interview report, Fusion GPS was hired by an ex-staffer of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat, to continue investigating Mr. Trump. Democratic donors chipped in $50 million.
Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson advocated stories that the National Rifle Association has been infiltrated by the Kremlin. He promoted the story that former Trump attorney Cohen traveled to Prague as part of an election-year coverup. Both narratives have shown up in McClatchy News service stories. Cohen on Wednesday for the umpteenth time denied going to Prague.
⦁ The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office has become Mr. Trump‘s main threat. It won the guilty pleas from Cohen. He implicated candidate Trump in a possible campaign finance violation by using Trump money to pay off two women who say they had affairs with Mr. Trump.
The office is filled with acolytes of Mr. Bharara, the former prosecutor whose Twitter account is a steady stream of Trump attacks. On Cohen’s sentencing memo, which laid out his crimes, were the signatures of four former Bharara colleagues: Andrea M. Griswold, Rachel Maimin, Thomas McKay and Nicolas Roos.
The day after they filed their memo, Mr. Bharara tweeted: “The brilliant and dedicated professional ‘kids’ of the SDNY are among our best hopes for survival of the rule of law. We should be thanking them for their public service, not attacking them for doing their jobs.”
When Cohen’s opening House committee statement was released Tuesday night, Mr. Bharara tweeted: “With all due caveats, Michael Cohen’s prepared testimony is stunning.”
⦁ Fired by Mr. Trump, former FBI Director James B. Comey, an Obama appointee, leaked his memos-for-the-record to trigger a special prosecutor. He also bragged at a book event that he outmaneuvered the new Trump White House. He sent two agents to interview then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn without clearing the interview with the White House counsel.
⦁ Like his one-time boss, Mr. Comey, former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe is out with an anti-Trump memoir. He is also under investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., on a referral from the Justice Department inspector general.
Mr. McCabe’s defense attorney is Michael R. Bromwich. He is a former Obama political appointee who worked on the defense team of Christine Blasey Ford, the chief accuser of Trump U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Mr. McCabe’s public relations handler is Melissa Schwartz, who is Mr. Bromwich’s chief operating officer at his legal/communications firm. She worked alongside Mr. Bromwich in the Obama administration. On Capitol Hill, she served as communications director for Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Maryland Democrat.
Mr. McCabe has links to the Clinton machine: His wife ran for the Virginia Senate in 2015 with money from then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s political action committee. Mr. McAuliffe is a longtime Clinton loyalist, and his PAC was funded with Clinton associate contributions.
⦁ Clinton agents Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer developed their own anti-Trump dossier. They fed it through the Obama State Department, and it ended up with the FBI. Mr. Steele fed his allegations to the same places.
⦁ House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, New York Democrat, has brought in a special anti-Trump legal team: Norman Eisen was Mr. Obama‘s ethics lawyer inside the White House. He has castigated Mr. Trump at his post at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Barry Berke, a New York white-collar defense lawyer, has joined Mr. Eisen in writing anti-Trump columns, such as the Dec. 12 CNN article “Trump‘s ‘no smoking gun’ defense won’t protect him.”
They suggest that known contacts between Trump people and Russians add up to an election conspiracy.
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The Clintons are criminals and the deep state is doing everything they can to suppress the truth.
Shocking closed-door testimony reveals FBI’s top lawyer wanted to investigate Hillary Clinton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eohaCGaXvbg
Congressman Jim Jordan–
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDopKgsmMxs
Would that be the same Jim Jordan that overlooked the sexual abuse of wrestlers at Phio State?
*Ohio
Lannie Davis doesn’t work for free. Wonder who’s footing the legal bills for Cohen?
And for 2 years, Mueller and his Miscreants have been looking for Russians under every bush except the bushes surrounding $hrilLIARy and the DNC. Perhaps the taxpayer$ should go after a refund from the Bubba Foundation . . . .
The Russians hacked the DNC, J, then released information that hurt her in the campaign. Your theory makes no sense for that reason, as well as the many other reasons I listed below. I’m curious if you’ll take the time to try and explain away any of the facts I outlined.
To quote John Wayne in “El Dorado,” – “You can’t argue with a closed door.”
You are waste of time.
Do you consider yourself more open-minded and less partisan than me?
Who are some Democrats you admire? I’ll name some Republicans I admire: John McCain, Justin Amash, David French, S.E. Cupp. Other conservative writers I like include Ben Howe, Tom Nichols, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, and Cathy Young.
Not sure where to begin here…
Trump himself has hired a lawyer, Emmett Flood, who represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment hearings. The fact that Michael Cohen also has a lawyer who once represented the Clintons seems completely irrelevant to me. Lawyers, as well as investigators, may have biases, but they are trained to not let them influence their jobs.
For example, Stzork and Page (who worked on the Russia probe–they didn’t “orchestrate” it, as the article falsely claims) have been trashed for the bias that was revealed in their text messages, but no one has shown any evidence that their bias influenced their work on the case. It would have been very easy for them to do so–they could have leaked the fact that the investigation was happening, but they didn’t. Instead, we did not even know about the investigation until after the election was over. Remember that Clinton was being publicly investigated at the same time, something that Trump brought up every chance he got.
It’s also really obvious that the article goes out of its way to avoid mentioning the fact that Mueller, McCabe, and Comey are all registered Republicans and have been for a very long time. Comey in particular infamously revealed information about the Clinton investigation a week before the election that many believe swung the election in Trump’s favor. This was clearly not Comey’s intent, but if anything, I suspect he was bending over backwards to fight a bias against Trump.
“Clinton and Obama supporters started and sustained Trump-Russia collusion theories. Their centerpiece is the anti-Trump dossier funded by Mrs. Clinton‘s campaign and the Democratic Party. ”
No, the dossier is absolutely not the “centerpiece” of the Russian investigation. I can think of tons of more salient facts then that:
1. Members of the Trump campaign accepted a meeting with people who told them they were with the Russian government and had dirt on Hillary Clinton. In the e-mail, they clearly say they are acting in accordance with the Russian government’s desire to help Trump become president.
2. Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman, was an unregistered foreign agent working on behalf of Russia’s interests in the Ukraine. He passed private polling data to Wikileaks, a Russian propaganda arm.
3. Another campaign official, Roger Stone, had multiple contacts with Wikileaks.
4.Trump publicly asked Russia to find more of Hillary’s e-mails. That same day, Russia hacked Clinton’s servers. (No, it was not a “joke.” There is no one on earth who genuinely believes that Trump would not have been happy about Russia hacking Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/13/us/politics/trump-russia-clinton-emails.html
5. Multiple members of the Trump campaign, as well as Trump’s pick for head of national security, have been convicted of lying about their discussions with Russia.
6. Another Trump campaign official, Carter Page, was placed under surveillance because the FBI and a FISA court believed there was evidence indicating he could be an actual Russian spy. (This was *supported* by the dossier, but also by a ton of other evidence the FBI already had.)
7. Jared Kushner discussed setting up a secret backchannel from the White House to the Kremlin. Kushner was not properly vetted and multiple security experts argued against him getting a security clearance, but they were overruled by Trump, who lied about it and said that he didn’t have anything to do with that decision.
8. Trump was planning a major real estate deal in Moscow during the campaign, while lying to the American people that he had no dealings with Russia at that time.
9. After a private meeting with Putin, Trump took his interpreter’s notes and ordered the interpreter to not talk about what had transpired even to other members of the administration.
10. Trump has repeatedly parroted Putin’s denial that Russia had anything to do with the hacking of Clinton and the DNC, siding with the dictator over our own intelligence agencies. He has also delayed implementing sanctions while withdrawing others, and has pushed for Russia to be allowed back into the G8.
11. Trump fired Jeff Sessions, his attorney general, for refusing to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, as Sessions was legally required to do.
These are all known facts. Again, aside from the Carter Page issue, which was supported by evidence gathered prior to the dossier, none of this was uncovered by the Steele dossier itself. And I’m almost certain I’m forgetting a few details. A lot of this has been slowly uncovered over time; why would anyone believe this is a complete list, and that there won’t be more revelations?
I challenge anyone to look at the above facts and argue that it would necessitate a Democratic or anti-Trump bias in order to investigate the campaign’s links to Russian election interference, as Mueller has been tasked to do. As many experts have argued, it would constitute negligence on the part of the DOJ to not investigate such a thing given all the damning details that are already in the public record.
I note that there really is no defense of Trump offered here, which was also true at the Cohen hearings. The most Republicans could do was try and destroy Cohen’s credibility, which is fair, but also counterproductive; you cannot separate Cohen’s lack of credibility from Trump’s lack of same. The two are inextricably linked. Cohen has been Trump’s attack dog for decades. He has always been an unethical liar and con man; that’s why Trump hired him! Even as Republicans were pointing out he was a “convicted liar,” they had to carefully sidestep the fact that he was convicted for telling lies for the benefit of President Trump himself. Republicans believed him when he told those lies. Now that he is making statements that implicate Trump in lawbreaking and shady behavior, Republicans want to believe he has suddenly started lying after decades of telling the truth. That just isn’t plausible.
Cohen worked for Trump because Trump routinely hires con men, liars, fraudsters, tax cheats, and unregistered foreign agents, because Trump is almost certainly some combination of the above. It doesn’t take a Democrat to realize that, hence the many NeverTrump Republicans. Attempting to delegitimize the investigation may save Trump’s reputation with the base–the 20-30% of Americans who will support him no matter what, and the only Americans Trump ever makes an attempt to connect to–but it shouldn’t work on anyone else.
More paranoia on display. It’s the Dems, Jack, not the “Deep State”. Get a grip.
I grant you: it was rather a circus, and I can’t see that it served any purpose other than the rubbing of The Donald’s nose into it, as we say.
But the unhappy fact is that Donald Trump is wholly unsuited to the position he holds. He is a malicious, ignorant, amoral bully, out of his own mouth, and by his own actions, and we will continue to point this out until he is gone from public life.
I grant you: it was rather a circus, and I can’t see that it served any purpose other than the rubbing of The Donald’s nose into it, as we say.
I don’t know. Cohen directly implicated Trump in a few more crimes. Now, he could be lying, as he lied for Trump for over a decade. But to determine that, we’d need a Congress who was interested in getting facts. As I heard a guest say on Renato Mariotti’s excellent podcast today, only one side was interested in that goal at the hearing, and it wasn’t the Republicans, who were more interested in personal attacks and in avoiding the facts, since they know those facts cannot be good for Trump.