Tag Archives: Devin Nunes

Counterfeit Elitism, by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on February 6, 2018 | Leave a comment

High blown credentials do not an elite make, at least in the sense of what “elite” used to mean: someone with superior qualities over the general run of humanity. From Victor Davis at amgreatness.com:

Those damn dairy farmers. Why do they insist on trying to govern? Or, put another way:

Why are Republicans trusting Devin Nunes to be their oracle of truth!? A former dairy farmer who House intel staffers refer to as Secret Agent Man because he has no idea what’s going on.

Thus spoke MSNBC panelist, Yale graduate, former Republican “strategist,” and Bush administration speechwriter Elise Jordan.

Jordan likely knows little about San Joaquin Valley family dairy farmers and little notion of the sort of skills, savvy, and work ethic necessary to survive in an increasingly corporate-dominated industry. Whereas dairy farmer Nunes has excelled in politics, it would be hard to imagine Jordan running a family dairy farm, at least given the evidence of her televised skill sets and sobriety.

Republicans “trust” Devin Nunes, because without his dogged efforts it is unlikely that we would know about the Fusion GPS dossier or the questionable premises on which FISA court surveillance was ordered. Neither would we have known about the machinations of an array of Obama Administration, Justice Department and FBI officials who, in addition to having possibly violated the law in monitoring a political campaign and unmasking and leaking names of Americans to the press, may have colluded with people in the Clinton campaign who funded the Steele dossier.

“Elite” is now an overused smear. But it is a fair pejorative when denoting a cadre that is not a natural or truly meritocratic top echelon, but is instead a group distinguished merely by schooling, associations, residence, connections and open disdain. If this is supposed to translate into some sort of received wisdom and acknowledged excellence, ordinary Americans may be pardoned for missing it.

To continue reading: Counterfeit Elitism

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What the FBI/FISA Memo Really Tells Us About Our Government, by Ron Paul

Posted on February 5, 2018 | Leave a comment

First and foremost, the House Intelligence Committee shows Americans that there is a Deep State with a deeply vested interest in perpetuating the status quo, which in the 2016 election meant getting Hillary Clinton elected, and afterwards meant discrediting Donald Trump. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

The release of the House Intelligence Committee’s memo on the FBI’s abuse of the FISA process set off a partisan firestorm. The Democrats warned us beforehand that declassifying the memo would be the end the world as we know it. It was reckless to allow Americans to see this classified material, they said. Agents in the field could be harmed, sources and methods would be compromised, they claimed.

Republicans who had seen the memo claimed that it was far worse than Watergate. They said that mass firings would begin immediately after it became public. They said that the criminality of US government agencies exposed by the memo would shock Americans.

Then it was released and the world did not end. FBI agents have thus far not been fired. Seeing “classified” material did not terrify us, but rather it demonstrated clearly that information is kept from us by claiming it is “classified.”

In the end, both sides got it wrong. Here’s what the memo really shows us:

First, the memo demonstrates that there is a “deep state” that does not want things like elections to threaten its existence. Candidate Trump’s repeated promises to get along with Russia and to re-assess NATO so many years after the end of the Cold War were threatening to a Washington that depends on creating enemies to sustain the fear needed to justify a trillion dollar yearly military budget.

Imagine if candidate Trump had kept his campaign promises when he became President. Without the “Russia threat” and without the “China threat” and without the need to dump billions into NATO, we might actually have reaped a “peace dividend” more than a quarter century after the end of the Cold War. That would have starved the war-promoting military-industrial complex and its network of pro-war “think tanks” that populate the Washington Beltway area.

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FISA-Gate: The Plot To Destroy Our Republic, by Justin Raimondo

Posted on February 5, 2018 | 1 comment

Justin Raimondo hopes the House Intelligence Committee memo is just the beginning. From Raimondo at antiwar.com:

You don’t need any special analytical abilities to understand “the memo” and its meaning. A simple reading reveals that allegations of skullduggery peeking by the Obama administration during the presidential campaign were entirely accurate: the memo just filled us in on the details. And while the debate has largely been over whether the proper legal procedures were followed by the FBI and administration officials in spying on Carter Page – someone only marginally connected to the Trump campaign – the real question is: why were they sneaking around Page at all?

Oh, he claimed to be an “informal advisor” to the Russian government: he had business interests in Russia and met with Russian officials. Furthermore, and most importantly, he opposed the anti-Russian hysteria that permeates official Washington, and he often said – in public speeches as well as privately – that US sanctions against Russia are a mistake.

But so what? Since when is it illegal to hold these views?

Page was never a “Russian agent,” and the FBI never proved that he was or is. Instead, they submitted that phony BuzzFeed “dossier” to the FISA court as “evidence” justifying their hot pursuit of him on more than one occasion. They did so without telling the judge who paid for the dossier (it was the Clinton campaign, as Trump claimed when this first came out) and they withheld other important details about its provenance – including that it was written by Christopher Steele, a “former” British intelligence agent who openly expressed a passionate desire to see Trump defeated. Nor had they verified the information in the dossier related to Page, because they “didn’t have time,” as former DNI chief James Clapper has said on numerous occasions.

Page was targeted and the information gleaned from listening in on his phone conversations, reading his email, and god knows what other sneaky intrusions, was leaked to the media in a concerted campaign to influence the outcome of the election. So, yes, there was “collusion” – except it wasn’t a pact between Putin and Trump but rather an alliance between Hillary’s campaign and the national security bureaucracy to get her elected. In effect, the top leadership of the FBI became an adjunct of the Clinton campaign – and, after Trump won, they executed a plan to frame him for “collusion” and oust him.

To continue reading: FISA-Gate: The Plot To Destroy Our Republic

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Biggest Nunes Memo Revelations Have Little To Do With Its Content, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on February 4, 2018 | Leave a comment

Republican Congressman Thomas Massie had the $64 question: “who made the decision to withhold evidence of FISA abuse until after Congress voted to renew FISA program?” The issue was analyzed in “Bad People Lied to a Kangaroo Court,” and its more important than the issues raised by the House Intelligence Committee’s memorandum. Caitlin Johnstone’s take, at consortiumnews.com:

The most important revelations of the Nunes Memo relate not to its content, but the political establishment’s response to its release, argues Caitlin Johnstone.

It’s fitting that the ever-tightening repetitive loops of America’s increasingly schizophrenic partisan warfare finally hit peak shrillness and skyrocketed into a white noise singularity on Groundhog Day. Right now, we’re right about at the part of the movie where Bill Murray is driving over a cliff in a pickup truck with a large rodent behind the wheel.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol on March 22, 2017, in Washington, DC.
Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

If you only just started paying attention to U.S. politics in 2017 what I’m about to tell you will blow your mind, so you might want to sit down for this: believe it or not, there was once a time when both of America’s mainstream political parties weren’t screeching every single day that there was news about to break any minute now which would obliterate the other party forever. No Russiagate, no Nunes memo, no Rachel Maddow red yarn graphs, no Sean Hannity “tick tock,” no nothing. People screaming that the end is nigh and it’s all about to come crashing down were relegated to street corners and the occasional Infowars appearance, not practicing mainstream political punditry for multimillion dollar salaries on MSNBC and Fox News.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that Americans are starting to look critically at the power dynamics in their country, but the partisan filters they’ve pulled over their eyes are causing mass confusion and delusion. Now everyone who questions the CIA is a Russian agent and the term “deep state” suddenly means “literally anyone who doesn’t like Donald Trump.” Your take on the contents of the Nunes memo will put you in one of two radically different political dimensions depending on which mainstream cult you’ve subscribed to, and it will cause you to completely miss the point of the entire ordeal.

To continue reading: Biggest Nunes Memo Revelations Have Little To Do With Its Content

 

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‘Release the Memo’ Is a Political Stunt, but I Want It Out Anyway, by Michael Krieger

Posted on February 1, 2018 | 1 comment

Perhaps the best reason for releasing the House Intelligence Committee memo is the people who don’t want it released. From Michael Krieger at libertyblitzkrieg.com:

Before I get started, I want to put my cards on the table. I don’t trust Republicans like Devin Nunes for a moment. He doesn’t care about the civil liberties of Americans, and it’s become clear to me the whole “release the memo” thing is largely a political stunt. I’m not claiming there isn’t anything important in there, but rather that they don’t have the best interests of the U.S. citizenry in mind.  Nevertheless, I’m very much in favor of it being released for a variety of reasons.

First, I want to offer a little advice. It’s always tempting to immediately take a side on whatever issue happens to be dominating the news cycle at any given moment, but this is typically a poor decision. One thing I’ve learned over the years is you should always wait at least a few days before coming to any sort of conclusion on most big stories being aggressively hyped by partisan pundits in the media.

From my seat, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress are being dishonest about the memo, which makes perfect sense because the vast majority of politicians in Washington D.C. are corrupt liars who pretend to hate each other while consistently passing bipartisan legislation to abuse the American public. If that’s not obvious to you by now, I don’t know what it’ll take.

Devin Nunes and other Republicans in the House of Representatives have been attempting to portray their push to release the memo as some sort of civil liberties crusade. They claim it’ll expose the criminality of the deep state and how it abuses its unconstitutional surveillance powers. Perhaps it will, but that’s not at all what’s driving the effort.

To continue reading: ‘Release the Memo’ Is a Political Stunt, but I Want It Out Anyway

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House Intelligence Committee Will Vote To Release FISA Corruption Memo… by sundance

Posted on January 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

This article takes exception with an assertion in an article yesterday by Glenn Greenwald that it’s a relatively easy matter to publicly disclose an allegedly explosive House Intelligence Committee report. The article has a fantastic list of links A hat to tip to SLL reader neilmdunn for this article, by sundance at theconservativetreehouse.com:

According to Representative Dave Joyce (R-OH14) the House Intelligence Committee will hold a vote on the release of the four-page Nunes memo that reveals systemic corruption within the DOJ and FBI; including the unlawful use of FISA-702(16)(17) data searches which were part of an elaborate DOJ-FBI surveillance program on the political campaign of Donald Trump.

Additionally, Chad Pergram reported that Chairman Devin Nunes met with Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte to discuss the best process to release the memo.   There are generally two ways it could be done, the HPSCI vote is the most likely.

As more people have become aware of the back-story to the campaign surveillance, FISA-702 issue, and the unlawful conduct of the FBI and DOJ, there is also a great deal of misinformation.  Few people have followed the entire story as it unfolded and that has led to large numbers of people mistakenly thinking the process for revealing the classified intelligence -at the heart of the issue- can be easily released.

There are also multiple media voices taking advantage of people with limited understanding of the year-long process.  Glenn Greenwald published an article today claiming there were “Four Easy Ways” the Nunes memo could be revealed.  That article by Greenwald is intentional disinformation targeted to cloud the larger issues and create chaos.  A deconstruction of Greenwald’s ridiculous arguments is HERE.

It is essential the process is followed that allows the larger story to come out without providing the use of political cover by those who are intent on hiding the corruption.

To continue reading: House Intelligence Committee Will Vote To Release FISA Corruption Memo…

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Republicans Have Four Easy Ways to #ReleaseTheMemo — and the Evidence for It. Not Doing So Will Prove Them to Be Shameless Frauds. by Glenn Greenwald and Jon Schwarz

Posted on January 20, 2018 | 2 comments

After all the ruckus the Republicans have  raised about their report on FISA court irregularities by the FBI and Department of Justice, they’d better make the report public. From Glenn Greenwald and Jon Schwarz at theintercept.com:

ONE OF THE gravest and most damaging abuses of state power is to misuse surveillance authorities for political purposes. For that reason, The Intercept, from its inception, has focused extensively on these issues.

We therefore regard as inherently serious strident warnings from public officials alleging that the FBI and Department of Justice have abused their spying power for political purposes. Social media last night and today have been flooded with inflammatory and quite dramatic claims now being made by congressional Republicans about a four-page memo alleging abuses of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act spying processes during the 2016 election. This memo, which remains secret, was reportedly written under the direction of the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, GOP Rep. Devin Nunes, and has been read by dozens of members of Congress after the committee voted to make the memo available to all members of the House of Representatives to examine in a room specially designated for reviewing classified material.

The rhetoric issuing from GOP members who read the memo is notably extreme. North Carolina Republican Rep. Mark Meadows, chair of the House Freedom Caucus, called the memo “troubling” and “shocking” and said, “Part of me wishes that I didn’t read it because I don’t want to believe that those kinds of things could be happening in this country that I call home and love so much.” GOP Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania stated: “You think about, ‘Is this happening in America or is this the KGB?’ That’s how alarming it is.”

This has led to a ferocious outcry on the right to “release the memo” – and presumably thereby prove that the Obama administration conducted unlawful surveillance on the Trump campaign and transition. On Thursday night, Fox News host and stalwart Trump ally Sean Hannity claimed that the memo described “the systematic abuse of power, the weaponizing of those powerful tools of intelligence and the shredding of our Fourth Amendment constitutional rights.”

Given the significance of this issue, it is absolutely true that the memo should be declassified and released to the public — and not just the memo itself. The House Intelligence Committee generally and Nunes specifically have a history of making unreliable and untrue claims (its report about Edward Snowden was full of falsehoods, as Bart Gellman amply documented, and prior claims from Nunes about “unmasking” have been discredited). Thus, mere assertions from Nunes — or anyone else — are largely worthless; Republicans should provide American citizens not merely with the memo they claim reveals pervasive criminality and abuse of power, but also with all of the evidence underlying its conclusions.

To continue reading: Republicans Have Four Easy Ways to #ReleaseTheMemo — and the Evidence for It. Not Doing So Will Prove Them to Be Shameless Frauds

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A Hole in the Constitution, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on April 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

That hole was blown long ago. From Andrew P. Napolitano at antiwar.com:

The issue of federal government surveillance of Americans has largely occupied Washington politicians and the media since President Donald Trump first accused the administration of his predecessor of spying on him while he and his colleagues worked at Trump Tower in New York City during the presidential election campaign and during the presidential transition.

Trump’s allegations were initially dismissed as a diversionary tactic to get the attention of the media and the interest of the public off allegations made against the Trump campaign that it conspired with agents of Russian intelligence to facilitate Russian interference with the presidential election. Even some very smart colleagues of mine dismissed Trump’s allegations, arguing that no one in Washington found them believable.

Then the director of the FBI, James Comey, and the director of the National Security Agency, America’s 60,000-person-strong domestic spying apparatus, Adm. Mike Rogers, testified under oath that they knew of no surveillance of candidate or President-elect Trump at Trump Tower. When I heard these denials, I thought them to be odd at best and erroneous at worst because I was privy to credible chatter in the intelligence community that Trump’s allegations were correct, and I knew that the FBI had revealed it was examining the activities of the Trump campaign to look for Russian involvement and that such an examination would surely find the surveillance of Trump that the intelligence community was chatting about.

Then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., revealed that whistleblowers from the intelligence community had approached him with evidence supportive of Trump’s claims. He viewed this evidence and revealed that it showed surveillance of candidate and President-elect Trump, but it had nothing to do with Russia. Then Nunes’ Democratic counterpart on the same committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who had complained loud and long that he had not seen the documents, viewed the same documents and afterward remained essentially mute.

To continue reading: A Hole in the Constitution

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How The Surveillance Program Works, And Who Can Order It: Former Intel Chair Explains, by Tyler Durden

Posted on March 26, 2017 | Leave a comment

The spotlight is shifting from the Russian hacking and influence story to the much more substantial story involving surveillance of Trump and team, and disclosure of what should have been secret information to the media (a point SLL made a month ago in Plot Holes). From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

As the Russians-hacked-the-DNC narrative collapses, and evidence-less accusations of Trump-Putin relations fade fast, the circle of possible culprits behind the one crime that we know for sure that happened – the leaking of unmasked American’s names in intelligence intercepts – is narrowing hour by hour.

Former House intel chair Pete Hoekstra tells Fox Business, who could have ordered the wiretapping of Trump campaign and authorized the unmasking of Americans’ names in the intercepts.

Hoekstra goes on to tell The Wall Street Journal,

“When I was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, I was routinely involved in briefings as a member of the “Gang of Eight”—both parties’ leaders in the House and Senate and on the intelligence committees. I cannot recall how many times I asked to see raw intelligence reporting and was refused because that stuff is just not made available to policy makers.

But according to Mr. Nunes, such information made its way to the Obama White House before Inauguration Day. Few if any people working in the White House would ever need to see raw intelligence. Like intelligence committee members, they are typically consumers of intelligence products, not raw intelligence.

The raw transcripts of masked persons – or unmasked persons, or U.S. persons who can be easily identified – making their way to the White House is very likely unprecedented. One can only imagine who, at that point, might be reading these reports. Valerie Jarrett? Susan Rice? Ben Rhodes? The president himself? We don’t know, and the people who do aren’t talking at the moment.”

The point here, as The Washington Examinder writes, assuming again that Nunes spoke truthfully in his presser, is that this could potentially become a huge story. This despite the extremely negative reaction that Nunes got from journalists on Twitter.

To continue reading: How The Surveillance Program Works, And Who Can Order It: Former Intel Chair Explains

 

 

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Nunes Confirms There Was “Incidental Surveillance” Of Trump During Obama Administration, “Seems To Be Inappropriate”, by Tyler Durden

Posted on March 22, 2017 | Leave a comment

The ball is back in the Democrats’/Intelligence Community’s/Media’s court after this latest disclosure from House Intelligence Community Devin Nunes. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Update: House Intel Chairman Nunes spoke to reporters when he left the briefing at The White House and had some more stunning things to say:

*NUNES: BRIEFED PRESIDENT ON CONCERNS OVER INCIDENTAL COLLECTION
*NUNES: `PRESIDENT NEEDS TO KNOW’ THESE INTEL REPORTS EXIST
*NUNES: SOME OF WHAT I’VE SEEN SEEMS TO BE `INAPPROPRIATE’
*NUNES: TRUMP, OTHERS IN TRANSITION PUT INTO INTELLIGENCE REPORT
*NUNES: QUESTION IS IF TRUMP SHOULD BE IN THESE `NORMAL’ REPORTS

Tom Watson ✔@tomwatson
Wow – Nunes just said there are “multiple FISA warrants out there” involving Trump.
12:13 PM – 22 Mar 2017
2,782 Retweets 3,438 likes

As we detailed earlier, it appears Trump may have been right, again.

Two days after FBI director Comey shot down Trump’s allegation that Trump was being wiretapped by president Obama before the election, it appears that president Trump may have been on to something because moments ago, the House Intelligence Chairman, Devin Nunes, told reporters that the U.S. intelligence community incidentally collected information on members of President Trump’s transition team, possibly including Trump himself, and the information was “widely disseminated” in intelligence reports.

As AP adds, Nunes said that President Donald Trump’s communications may have been “monitored” during the transition period as part of an “incidental collection.”

Nunes told a news conference Wednesday that the communications appear to be picked up through “incidental collection” and do not appear to be related to the ongoing FBI investigation into Trump associates’ contacts with Russia. He says he believes the intelligence collections were done legally, although in light of the dramatic change in the plotline it may be prudent to reserve judgment on how “incidental” it was.

“I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions, the intelligence community collected information on U.S. individuals involved in the Trump transition,” Nunes told reporters.

“Details about U.S. persons involved in the incoming administration with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reports.”

The information was “legally brought to him by sources who thought we should know it,” Nunes said, though he provided little detail on the source.

To continue reading: Nunes Confirms There Was “Incidental Surveillance” Of Trump During Obama Administration, “Seems To Be Inappropriate”

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