Will the US launch a false flag gas attack in Syria? When will the false flag known as Russiagate be terminated? From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:
And so the Golden Golem of Greatness re-enters the hall of mirrors that Syria has become. The US intelligence “community” has informed the US Media that Syrian President Assad is planning a new gas attack on Idlib Province, where a ragtag army of US-backed “rebels” (ISIS, etc) remain holed up against Assad’s forces backed by Russian air support. Have we seen this movie before?
Is Mr. Assad truly that dumb? — since the last time a gas attack was alleged (and actually never proven), Mr. Trump averred that he would attack Syria. And what did he even mean by that? Send a barrel bomb down the Assad family chimney, or just blow up more stuff on the ground? And for what? To birth another failed state in the Middle East (just what the world needs), or perhaps start World War Three with Russia? (Ditto, with a cherry on top.) Continue reading →
The real Russian collusion conspiracy, the one involving Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the DNC, and Robert Mueller and team, is gradually being exposed. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:
Quite a hot time in the ole Swamp this week, with the gators, ‘possums, snakes, and snappers roiling the filthy waters to a bloody froth in the battle for supremacy of the food chain. The Swamp even has its own version of Bigfoot, the Golden Golem of Greatness. Lumbering and garrulous, unlike his shy cousin of the Oregon forests, the flaxen-haired giant plies the sloughs, oak domes, and cypress hammocks desperately seeking respect. His bellowing can be heard each night through the din of chittering insects, croaking bullfrogs, laughing anhingas, and the baying bloodhounds at his heels, as he searches for the fabled drain-plug that might convert this treacherous ecology into an upland peaceable kingdom.
This could be the start of what many of us have been waiting for: Trump going after the swamp creatures who have trying to depose him. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
Federal prosecutors have been using a grand jury over the last several months to investigate former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, reports the Washington Post, citing two people familiar with the matter.
What’s more, the grand jury has summoned at least two witnesses, and the case is ongoing according to WaPo‘s sources.
The presence of the grand jury shows prosecutors are treating the matter seriously, locking in the accounts of witnesses who might later have to testify at a trial. But such panels are sometimes used only as investigative tools, and it remains unclear if McCabe will ultimately be charged. –Washington Post
McCabe was fired on March 16 after Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued a criminal referral following a months-long probe, which found that McCabe lied four times, including twice under oath, about authorizing a self-serving leak to the press. Horowitz found that McCabe “had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor – including under oath – on multiple occasions.”
Specifically, McCabe was fired for lying about authorizing an F.B.I. spokesman and attorney to tell Devlin Barrett of the Wall St. Journal – just days before the 2016 election, that the FBI had not put the brakes on a separate investigation into the Clinton Foundation, at a time in which McCabe was coming under fire for his wife taking a $467,500 campaign contribution from Clinton proxy pal, Terry McAuliffe.
In order to deal with his legal woes, McCabe set up a GoFundMe “legal defense fund” which stopped accepting donations, after support for the fired bureaucrat took in over half a million dollars – roughly $100,000 more than his wife’s campaign took from McAuliffe as McCabe’s office was investigating Clinton and her infamous charities.
Who’s lying?
In May, federal investigators from the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office interviewed former FBI director James Comey as part of an ongoing probe into whether McCabe broke the law when he lied to federal agents, reports the Washington Post.
Investigators from the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office recently interviewed former FBI director James B. Comey as part of a probe into whether his deputy, Andrew McCabe, broke the law by lying to federal agents — an indication the office is seriously considering whether McCabe should be charged with a crime, a person familiar with the matter said. –Washington Post
Of particular interest is that Comey and McCabe have given conflicting reports over the events leading up to McCabe’s firing, with Comey calling his former deputy a liarin an April appearance on The View, where he claimed to have actually “ordered the [IG] report” which found McCabe guilty.
Comey was asked by host Megan McCain how he thought the public was supposed to have “confidence” in the FBI amid revelations that McCabe lied about the leak.
“It’s not okay. The McCabe case illustrates what an organization committed to the truth looks like,” Comey said. “I ordered that investigation.”
Comey then appeared to try and frame McCabe as a “good person” despite all the lying.
“Good people lie. I think I’m a good person, where I have lied,” Comey said. “I still believe Andrew McCabe is a good person but the inspector general found he lied,” noting that there are “severe consequences” within the DOJ for doing so.
Everybody seems to have forgotten the Inspector General will be releasing a report on the behind the scenes machinations behind the Trump investigation. However, given what we already know, the report is liable to have some bombshells. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:
You can see where this Mueller thing is going: to the moment when the Golden Golem of Greatness finally swats down the political horsefly that has orbited his glittering brainpan for a whole year, and says, “There! It’s done.”
It suggests that Civil War Two will end up looking a whole lot more like the French Revolution than Civil War One. The latter unfurled as a solemn tragedy; the former as a Coen Brothers style opéra bouffe bloodbath. Having executed the presidential swat to said orbiting horsefly, Trump will try to turn his attention to the affairs of the nation, only to find that it is insolvent and teetering on the most destructive workout of bad debt the world has ever seen. And then his enemies will really go to work. In the process, they’ll probably wreck the institutional infrastructure needed to run a republic in constitutional democracy mode.
They got a good start in politicizing the upper ranks of the FBI, a fatal miscalculation based on the certainty of a Hillary win, which would have enabled the various schemers in the J. Edgar Hoover building to just fade back into the procedural woodwork of the agency and get on with life. Instead, their shenanigans were exposed and so far one key player, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, was hung out to dry by a committee of his fellow agency execs for lying about his official conduct. Long about now, you kind of wonder: is that where it ends for him? Seems like everybody else (and his uncle) is getting indicted for lying to the FBI. How about Mr. McCabe, since that is exactly why his colleagues at the FBI fired him?
It’s been slow motion, but slowly but surely the rats are deserting the sinking ship and, in a blatant mixed metaphor, the nooses are starting to cinch. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
Quite a bit of FBI-related news broke late Friday;
A newly unredacted section of a House Intel Committee report reveals that former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe told Congressional investigators that the FBI had virtually no case against Mike Flynn
The same report reveals that James Comey contradicted himself during a recent interview with Bret Baier
Comey, McCabe and then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord gave the committee “conflicting testimony”
Anti-Trump FBI “Lovebird” Lisa Page (with whom Peter Strzok was having an affaird) has flown the coop, tendering her resignation on Friday
One of Comey’s closest confidants, former FBI top lawyer James A. Baker also resigned Friday
A newly unredacted version of the House Intelligence Committee’s final report on Russia was released on Friday, containing bombshell revelations stemming from the Congressional testimony of former FBI and DOJ officials Andrew McCabe and James Comey.
For starters, the redacted section of the report covers up the fact that former deputy director Andrew McCabe told Congressional investigators the FBI had virtually no case against former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn.
McCabe also says that former FBI Director James Comey spearheaded the “ambush” of Flynn at the White House – in which two FBI agents, one of whom was Peter Strzokdropped in unannounced to interrogate him.
Compare the fully redacted version that came out last week to the mostly unredacted version that came out today. Do you see what DOJ/FBI tried to cover up? McCabe said they hadn't substantiated anything against Flynn, and the ambush of Flynn at the WH was directed by Comey. pic.twitter.com/6Fc9U3kVwM
McCabe told the committee that “The two people who interviewed [Flynn] didn’t think he was lying[.]” as well as “[N]ot [a] great beginning of a false statement case.”
“Deputy Director McCabe confirmed the interviewing agent’s initial impression and stated that the ‘conundrum that we faced on their return from the interview is that although [the agents] didn’t detect deception in the statements that he made in the interview … the statements were inconsistent with our understanding of the conversation that he had actually had with the ambassador,’” the report states.
At least 90 percent of what Paul Craig Roberts writes is pessimistic, so when he finds some good news to write about, it might be worth noticing. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:
Washington’s gratuitous raising of tensions with Russia that we have been witnessing for many years is so reckless and irresponsible that we need some relief from the depression of it all. Perhaps I am grasping at straws, but here are some hopeful developments.
—An establishment journalist, Michael Goodwin, the chief political columnist for the New York Post and a former bureau chief for the New York Times, has blamed the New York Times and Washington Post for the destruction of journalistic standards in the United States. https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/2016-election-demise-journalistic-standards/
—James Kallstrom, an Assistant Director of the FBI, told Fox News that high-ranking people throughout the US government coordinated a plot to help Hillary Clinton avoid indictment:
“I think we have ample facts revealed to us during this last year and a half that high-ranking people throughout government, not just the FBI, high-ranking people had a plot to not have Hillary Clinton, you know, indicted.
“I think it goes right to the top. And it involves that whole [Russiagate] strategy—they were gonna win, nobody would have known any of this stuff, and they just unleashed the intelligence community. Look at the unmaskings. We haven’t heard anything about that yet. Look at the way they violated the rights of all those American citizens.”
It is possible that the firing of Deputy FBI Director McCabe has opened for public exposure the plot hatched by the CIA, FBI, Departments of Justice and State, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee to cover up Hillary’s felonies and to falsely accuse Donald Trump of conspiring with Russian President Putin to steal the US presidential election. If Trump doesn’t chicken out, it is possible to put Brennan, Comey, McCabe, Hillary, and many others in prison for their egregious and bold assault on American democracy and the rule of law. These prosecutions would break the power, of much of it, of the secret national security state, and, thereby, make it possible for Trump to return to his campaign promise to normalize relations with Russia. If these relations are not normalized, war will be the result. But at least now there is a chance.
Good riddance, Andrew McCabe. From Sara Carter at saracarter.com:
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was forced to resign Monday, just as the House Intelligence Committee is expected to vote on the public release of a classified memo this afternoon revealing extensive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse under the Obama administration, sources told this reporter.
McCabe apparently lashed out to his colleagues when he was told he would be asked to resign, according to sources. FBI Director Christopher Wray viewed the four-page memo on Sunday, sources familiar with the discussions said.
McCabe, who is facing three federal inquiries for conflicts-of-interest during his time at the FBI, is one of the numerous names mentioned in the classified memo detailing FISA abuse, according to sources who reviewed the memo.
The federal inquiries into allegations against McCabe, who was expected to resign in March, are based on documents and interviews conducted by this reporter over the past year and range from sexual discrimination to improper political activity.
McCabe, a central figure in the ongoing Russia investigation against Trump, is also part of the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s ongoing review into the FBI’s handling of former Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to send classified information.
Current and former FBI officials said McCabe’s resignation is the beginning of more resignations to come.
“There are people lining up in the bureau to go after McCabe,” said a former FBI official, with knowledge. “There will be a clean up at the Bureau of his cronies.”
According to several U.S. officials, McCabe’s government communications were collected as part of the ongoing DOJ Inspector General investigation, which is expected to be completed by March.
FBI spokeswoman Carol Cratty declined to comment on the resignation.
Is the government shutdown, which the Democrats will mostly be blamed for, misdirection from the burgeoning FBI and Justice Department scandals? From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:
Is there any doubt that the Democratic Party will be blamed for the government shutdown brought on by the DACA showdown? They insisted on a DACA deal that would have enabled everybody-and-his-uncle in a DACA person’s family to migrate to this country, a formula known as chain migration. Did they really believe that would go over? Or is it just more identity politics posturing?
I’m not the first observer to point out that it looks like the Democratic Party puts the interests of non-citizens above everybody else in the country. That’s what will be remembered about this gambit at the polls in November. It also looks like an engineered misdirection away from the more ominous fast-developing story about political corruption at the highest level of the Justice Department and its subsidiary, the FBI.
Unlike the allegations in the slow-cooking Russian Collusion story — allegations so far uncoupled from evidence — there’s plenty of evidence that FBI leadership deliberately mishandled several concurrent Hillary Clinton inquiries and, along with other players in the giant NSA matrix, launched the Russia Collusion story to derail Donald Trump’s legitimacy in office. Former President Obama and his White House aides are implicated in these machinations. Whether you’re a Trump fan or not, this ought to raise troubling questions about the legitimacy of the FBI.
On Sunday, the FBI revealed that it had lost five months of text messages between Trump antagonists Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The agency offered a lame explanation that “software upgrades” and “misconfiguration issues” interfered with the app that is supposed to automatically save and archive communications between officials on FBI phones. This was the couple who chattered about an FBI-generated “insurance policy” for the outcome of the 2016 election with Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. When will these three be invited to testify before a house or senate committee to inform the nation exactly what the “insurance policy” was?
Uranium One may be the stinkiest scandal in Washington. It certainly involves a lot of big names. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
Friday’s 11-count indictment of former uranium transportation company executive, Mark Lambert, was the latest in a series of DOJ prosecutions involving individuals linked to the Russian nuclear industry and the Uranium One deal.
According to the indictment, Lambert and others at Transport Logistics International (TLI) engaged in several counts of bribery, kickbacks and money laundering with Russian nuclear official Vadim Mikerin, in order to secure business advantages with TENEX – a subsidiary of Rosatom, the Kremlin’s state-owned energy company which bought Uranium One.
TLI would have ostensibly transported all of the uranium from the U1 deal, were it not for an FBI undercover mole buried deep within the Russian nuclear industry who gathered extensive evidence of corruption.
What many don’t realize is that Lambert’s Friday indictment is not the first linked to the Uranium One deal.
In fact, Robert Mueller’s FBI had been investigating the scheme since at least 2008 – with retiring Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe assigned to the ongoing investigation which was hidden from the Committee on Foreign Investments in the Untid States (CFIUS). Had they known, the committee never would have approved the Uranium One deal with TENEX’s parent company, Rosatom.
Four individuals were eventually prosecuted and given plea agreements after the Uranium One deal was approved. The prosecuting DOJ attorneys? Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and top Mueller investigator in the Trump-Russia probe, Andrew Weissman – who praised former acting Attorney General Sally Yates for defying Trump.
Unsurprisingly, all four indicted individuals were handed extremely light sentences, none of which made headlines.
The judge? Theodore Chuang – an Obama appointee who went to Harvard Law at the same time as Obama, advised Hillary Clinton as “Counselor on detail to the United States Department of State,” and just so happened to strike down Trump’s “Travel Ban” Executive Order. Chuang’s wife, Jacinta Ma served as a senior policy advisor to Michelle Obama.
Andrew McCabe’s days of running interference for the Clintons are coming to an end. What will he do in retirement? We hope he’s working with his lawyers on his legal defense, which implies that he will be investigated and perhaps prosecuted. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
Just hours after the FBI’s top lawyer, James Baker, was reassigned, WaPo reports that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe will retire in a few months – once he becomes fully eligible for pension benefits.
McCabe, who has been the target of Republican critics for more than a year, spent hours in Congress this past week, facing questions behind closed doors from members of three committees.
Republicans said they were dissatisfied with his answers:
The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), has called for McCabe’s ouster, saying he “ought to go for reasons of being involved in some of the things that took place in the previous administration. We want to make sure that there’s not undue political influence within the FBI — the [Justice] Department and the FBI.”
Democrats called it a partisan hounding:
Democrats emerging from Thursday’s questioning of McCabe urged him to resist Republicans’ calls to step down, saying the GOP’s new focus on McCabe smells of political opportunism. “Mr. McCabe should in no way be fired by biased political commentary,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.).
But whichever it was, The Washington Post reports, according to people familiar with the matter, McCabe plans to retire in a few months when he becomes fully eligible for pension benefits.
As a reminder, McCabe was former director James B. Comey’s right-hand man, a position that involved him in most of the FBI’s actions that vex President Trump as well as the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state, a matter that still riles Democrats.
McCabe won’t become eligible for his full pension until early March. People close to him say he plans to retire as soon as he hits that mark.
“He’s got about 90 days, and some of that will be holiday time. He can make it,’’ said one.
A spokesman for McCabe declined to comment, as did an FBI spokesman.
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