drcrinum said:

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What an unbelievably convoluted pile of corruption, I can't wrap my head around how or why so many supposedly intelligent people could engage in such nefarious activities. At this point it wouldn't surprise me if President Trump is the unnamed informant.

Wasn't this meeting intended to satisfy the contempt threat? How in the hell can this be legal? Isn't this akin to an employee being subordinate ? Who has the ability to walk into DOJ and say give them the documents? (Besides Trump)

At this point I actually don't care what's on the document as much as I can't believe how blatantly flagrant the DOJ / FBI is being about telling the people with oversight authority to go fly a kite. Clean house too to bottom.

Yes you read that right

RoscoePColtrane said:

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This is he most succinct summary of what I believe the current state of affairs to be that I have read. For all of those who are following along with this thread but finding it is like trying to drink out of a fire hose, read the Link above. .

RoscoePColtrane said:

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Mueller's team indicted the proverbial ham sandwich.

Jesus Rhee and company looking a little "unprepared"

So we now have identified Special Agent Joe Pientka, Counter Intelligence Division, FBI, was likely the second FBI special agent present at the questioning of Gen Flynn with Special Agent Peter Strzok who is the head of the FBI Counter Intelligence Division.

So to me it started out this entire thing as a Counter Intelligence Operation from the beginning. So you load up your team with counter intelligence investigators, and white collar crime lawyers, to investigate possible election tampering and obstruction of justice. Hmmm

Not sure this will go anywhere but something to keep in mind:

LINK

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Freedom Caucus Chairman Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., will seek a financial audit of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation based on reports that millions of dollars are being spent outside the scope of the investigation.

Meadows, who sits on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in an interview for C-Span's "Newsmakers" airing on Sunday that an audit is needed to ensure the Mueller team is properly spending the millions of dollars allocated so far to the Russia collusion probe, The Washington Examiner reported.

"There is some $3 million-plus that have been spent, or actually potentially not spent in a correct manner," the congressman said. "I'm not making any conclusion to that, because I always want to back up what I have, but we believe we need to look at that a little bit closer."

"We believe the American people need to know the scope of the investigation," Meadows added.

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The worm continues to turn on Mueller.

When you consider how much was going on in 2016 well before the election, it's amazing that Hillary didn't win. That's the truest testament to what a horrible candidate she was. But consider how hard they were trying to find something with enough credibility that they could use to swing the election, and couldn't do it. The corrupt media knew of the Steele dossier and even CNN wouldn't run with it.

I love this thread, but lately it's become hard to follow. So many different rabbit holes now. So I don't have much hope that the average person is even trying to keep up. But if it comes out that the FBI planted a mole in the Trump campaign, that's something that everyone with two brain cells will understand. I've got to trust that Trump won't allow this coverup to go on forever.

In addition to those who need to be tried for treason, Kimba Wood should be removed from the bench and disbarred. That is egregious behavior.

You are correct.

Ellis Wyatt said:

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In addition to those who need to be tried for treason, Kimba Wood should be removed from the bench and disbarred. That is egregious behavior.

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Baseless nonsense.

Lots of good info on this thread, no doubt about it. But also lots of silly posts the DU would envy.

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I love this thread, but lately it's become hard to follow. So many different rabbit holes now. So I don't have much hope that the average person is even trying to keep up.

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We are getting into the minutiae of the court room stuff. Hard for laypersons to grasp the import of what is happening. But here's the takeway, Mueller is mostly losing in court and in a humiliating fashion that even a first year associate would take pains to avoid.

Team Mueller's legal work has been shoddy in their research (indicting a Russian company that didn't even exist at the time they claimed it had committed wrongdoing), crafting pleadings that not only have a muddled time-line and narrative but creating new "crimes" out of whole cloth, (Manafort and the "conspiracy against the United States"), crafting search warrants that are over broad, totally unrelated to anything having to do with Russians and the 2016 election (Manafort and Cohen).

IOW, what would be expected when trying to fit a square peg (counter-intelligence operation) into a round hole (the United States' judicial system of due process.)

BMX Bandit said:

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Ellis Wyatt said:

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In addition to those who need to be tried for treason, Kimba Wood should be removed from the bench and disbarred. That is egregious behavior.

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Baseless nonsense.

Lots of good info on this thread, no doubt about it. But also lots of silly posts the DU would envy.

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Sorry, this reeks of collusion.

There is zero good reason for Hannity's name to have been put out there. Political bias is either ruining many people's judgment or they are flat-out corrupt. Neither is good for our justice system.

That horse was beaten to death.

No one has ever shown a reason his name should not be public. That's the standard. And Cohen attorneys barely even tried

Your theory would require Wood to have known the name beforehand. There's nothing to support that.

BMX Bandit said:

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That horse was beaten to death.

No one has ever shown a reason his name should not be public. That's the standard. And Cohen attorneys barely even tried

Your theory would require Wood to have known the name beforehand. There's nothing to support that.

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The thread reader above says she looked at the name on the back of an envelope and then decided to disclose it when the News network's laywer pressed her. I'm not sure how accurate that is.

I truly hope TexAgs or someone will archive this thread once everything is said and done. This information is legendary status, even now.
5 months, 12k plus posts, and about 874k views. I'm not doubting it breaks 20k / 1.5 M views before it's over. It will be fascinating to go back to day one and work through the numerous twists and turns and dissect just how close, or how far to the actual truth the main contributors were.

I guess that assumes that we EVER get the real truth, and this worries me.

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First, Judge Wood, in regards to receiving the name of @seanhannity on a written envelope so that it stays secret:

"If you hand the name up, I'll maintain it under seal."

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McCarthy's latest HERE.

Salient points:

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Simpson declined to answer more questions about this unidentified "human source." But when the media treated his revelation as a bombshell, he realized it would cause a feeding frenzy: Congress, the media, and the public would demand to know what would cause the FBI, in the stretch run of a presidential race, to use an informant against one candidate's campaign.

On a dime, Simpson backpedaled. Fusion GPS explained to friendly media that he believed he had "mischaracterized" the source. He must have been talking about George Papadopoulos not a "human source" in the sense of willing informant or spy, but a person attached to the campaign whose statements to an Australian diplomat had been passed to the FBI (through channels that, we shall see, have still not been explained).

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Simpson's testimony was released to the public on January 9, 2018. That was just a few days after the New York Timeshad published its big New Year's weekend story claiming, based on anonymous intelligence officials, that the Russia investigation had been opened sometime in July 2016.

The catalyzing event, we were told, was a report to the FBI that Papadopoulos, a young Trump-campaign adviser, had alleged that Russia possessed thousands of stolen Hillary Clinton emails. According to the story, Papadopoulos had been informed of this by Joseph Mifsud, a London-based academic who professed to have Kremlin connections. A few weeks later, while drinking in a London bar in May 2016, Papadopoulos blabbed the news to Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat.

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To repeat, while Simpson's testimony became public in January 2018, he actually gave the testimony five months earlier, in August 2017. Papadopoulos's name is not uttered in the 312-page transcript, just as it goes unmentioned in the Steele dossier.

Papadopoulos was virtually unheard of until October 30, 2017, when Special Counsel Mueller announced his guilty plea and filed a factual recitation of his offense conduct. Two weeks after that information became public, Simpson was asked about Papadopoulos in a fleeting exchange during testimony before the House Intelligence Committee (see November 14, 2017, transcript, page 163.)

Interestingly, the subject came up in the context of Trump-related research Simpson had done separate and apart from his collaboration with Steele. Simpson claimed that he had been looking at Papadopoulos "for a while" and regarded him as "a clone of Carter Page"; but he admitted that he actually knew nothing significant about Papadopoulos beyond what Mueller had included in the information filed in court at the time of the guilty plea.

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I had forgotten about that little tid-bit. Papadop wasn't indicted by a grand jury. Neither was Flynn. Mueller used an information as the charging instrument. Meaning he brought the charges himself. Meaning he could make up whatever the hell he wanted to threaten them with if they didn't plead guilty. Channeling his inner Robespierre and instituting his own Reign of Terror.

Only Manafort and Gates were the US persons actually indicted by grand juries for crimes having nothing to do with Russia or the 2016 election. (Setting aside the Russian persons and corporations which Mueller never expected to have to prove in court.)

aggiehawg said:

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RoscoePColtrane said:

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So we now have identified Special Agent Joe Pientka, Counter Intelligence Division, FBI, was likely the second FBI special agent present at the questioning of Gen Flynn with Special Agent Peter Strzok who is the head of the FBI Counter Intelligence Division.

So to me it started out this entire thing as a Counter Intelligence Operation from the beginning.

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And that is why Nunes and Gowdy have not been allowed to see the real EC, just a description of it in broad terms. It was a fishing expedition, one to be conducted in the shadows using sources and methods that violate due process rights of American citizens.

But herein lies the dilemma, for every Russian rock they turned over they found a Clintonista, not a Trumpian.

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This is the sweet irony of this entire Russia mess. None of this would have been uncovered and seen the light of day had Hillary and the democrats not accused Trump of colluding with Russia and tried to bring him down with this investigation. To quote Q, "these people are stupid".

Safe at Home said:

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But if it comes out that the FBI planted a mole in the Trump campaign, that's something that everyone with two brain cells will understand.

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Agree. FBI campaign mole + OIG report + indictments. That's a tsunami too big for even CNN to ignore .

Back to McCarthy:

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The information Mueller had filed in October said nothing about either Papadopoulos's meeting with Downer or the subsequent purported transmission of Papadopoulos's claims from Australian authorities to the FBI. That story did not come out until the Times article on December 30.

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Only after that, and in the uproar over the January 9 release of Simpson's five-month-old Senate testimony, did Fusion suggest that Simpson must have been referring to Downer, the Australian diplomat, when he told the Senate that the FBI had a "human source" inside the Trump campaign. That, however, is not credible.

When Simpson gave the "human source" testimony in August 2017, there is no indication that he knew anything about Downer. Even if we buy his House testimony in November that he had heard of Papadopoulos before the latter's October plea, Simpson conceded then that he knew nothing more than what Mueller had disclosed which did not include the PapadopoulosDowner meeting and the communication of it to the FBI.

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The narrative that Papadopoulus caused the counter-intel probe, doesn't hold water.

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When Simpson testified that Steele told him the FBI had a human source, I think Simpson meant exactly what that testimony implied: that someone from the FBI told Steele in August 2016 while the investigation was heating up, while the FBI was ramping up its efforts in preparation for seeking surveillance warrants from the FISA court that the Bureau had an informant.

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Next?

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For months, the House Intelligence Committee sought disclosure of the "electronic communication" (EC) by which the FBI opened its counterintelligence-investigation file on Papadopoulos, reportedly in July 2016. Counterintelligence involves national-security powers, and it is a weighty matter to apply these powers as opposed to criminal-investigative authorities to American citizens. The committee therefore wanted to know what foreign intelligence had spurred the probe, particularly in light of intelligence leaks that an Australian government report about Papadopoulos was the cause.

Yet, when Nunes was finally allowed to look at the EC, only after threatening contempt proceedings against Justice Department officials, he learned that the FBI did not set forth any foreign intelligence there was no Australian report, no "Five Eyes intelligence product" at all, Nunes told Fox News's Maria Bartiromo.

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And the big question:

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If the FBI was not explicitly relying on intelligence from a foreign ally, on what was it relying to open a counterintelligence investigation focusing on an American political campaign? According to what the New York Times reported in April 2017, "current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials" said the investigation was triggered by Carter Page's trip to Moscow. That would implicate the Clinton-campaign-generated Steele dossier, which claimed that Page's trip furthered a TrumpRussia conspiracy. I've detailed how, as reliance on the unverified dossier has become more controversial, the media and intelligence agencies have tried to minimize its importance to the opening of the investigation.

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These really shouldn't be difficult questions for the FBI and DOJ to answer, much less tell multiple and contradictory stories about it.

Well I feel better now. I brought up the fact that the pled cases for Mueller, including the lawyer Alex van der Zwaan, had pled guilty having never been indicted, and thought it was strange, especially the lawyer Alex van der Zwaan going for this, and that idiot is actually serving his sentence as we speak, when if he had just pushed back a little, Mueller's case may have folded. Of course he baited the plea with a chump change fine and a hand slap with 30 days in lockup. I even posted the charging documents if that's what you call them, and wondered how can this be happening in these courts. It was a head scratcher to me that Flynn would go along with that. I had originally assumed he was indicted, only to find out later he was charged and sentenced in the blink of an eye. Everyone just brush past that post so I moved on and didn't dwell on it. There's such a firehose of content coming at us daily it's easy to overlook.

Edit: Make that five I forgot about Richard Pinedo, the California guy that pled out for selling identities.

Honestly, I sometimes wonder if this thread is perused by our white hats. If it isn't, it SHOULD. The work in this thread is amazing. Thank you guys.

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It was a head scratcher to me that Flynn would go along with that. I had originally assumed he was indicted, only to find out later he was charged and sentenced in the blink of an eye. Everyone just brush past that post so I moved on and didn't dwell on it. There's such a firehose of content coming at us daily it's easy to overlook.

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Situational awareness. At the time of the Flynn plea deal, everyone assumed that there was a transcript of the conversation between Flynn and Kislyak, captured in a fully legal and uneventful manner. (Well, to lawyers anyway.)

Now we are learning those assumptions were probably way off of the mark and now it appears much more nefarious. I used the analogy of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror to describe Mueller's tactics earlier. Sadly it is becoming more and more apt as time goes on.

Even those of us who have been following this closely and have "outrage fatigue" for lack of a better term will likely still be blown away by the IG's report. I say that because of the extraordinary efforts by Rosenstein and even Team Mueller's court statements to obfuscate and cover-up what really happened.

BMX Bandit said:

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Your theory would require Wood to have known the name beforehand. There's nothing to support that.

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I can tell someone is just talking out of his ass without reading the story.

You think you're "above the fray" and so much more fair-minded than the rest of us.

It will be interesting to see how the media covers the initial release of the OIG report. Remember, they breathlessly broke into all network programming to announce the Russian indictments, which we now know are likely bogus or proved to be insignificant.

If the OIG report is anywhere close to what we think it is and the MSM ignores it or barely covers it I think it will be the most damning evidence yet of media complicity.

Of course if indictments rain down they will be forced to cover and spin like they never have before.

aggiehawg said:

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It was a head scratcher to me that Flynn would go along with that. I had originally assumed he was indicted, only to find out later he was charged and sentenced in the blink of an eye. Everyone just brush past that post so I moved on and didn't dwell on it. There's such a firehose of content coming at us daily it's easy to overlook.

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Situational awareness. At the time of the Flynn plea deal, everyone assumed that there was a transcript of the conversation between Flynn and Kislyak, captured in a fully legal and uneventful manner. (Well, to lawyers anyway.)

Now we are learning those assumptions were probably way off of the mark and now it appears much more nefarious. I used the analogy of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror to describe Mueller's tactics earlier. Sadly it is becoming more and more apt as time goes on.

Even those of us who have been following this closely and have "outrage fatigue" for lack of a better term will likely still be blown away by the IG's report. I say that because of the extraordinary efforts by Rosenstein and even Team Mueller's court statements to obfuscate and cover-up what really happened.

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And I can agree with that, on top of his mountain of legal bills he'd already racked up, and the rumors that Mueller was going after his son next.

That being said will Mueller end up beheaded without a trial? joking of course.