More than a hunch from here on the ranch.

It is very likely that there are still Clinton/Obama operatives that are directing folks in the FBI/DOJ/Special Council/news media on a daily basis. I suspect that Clinton/Obama representatives are talking to Mueller and his band of clintonistas on an ongoing basis.The recent letters from Gates and others supporting Brennan was orchestrated by the bad guys.

They would still like the coup to succeed, but now they have to cover their past crimes. As noted earlier , the coverup will be where they get tripped up.

Jeff Sessions, get off your butt and do your job.

Well Clapper is trying to hedge some on Brennan

Quite different from his joint appearance with Brennan at Ideas Festival.

https://themarketswork.com/2018/08/19/the-john-brennan-interview/

This is long but interesting...very revealing: Brennan interviewed by Maddow.
Brennan found nothing regarding Trump-Russian collusion, only hearsay & innuendo.
Brennan now has become very cautious regarding what he says.
During the interview, Brennan may have slipped and revealed that illegal intelligence gathering was going on.
Brennan = an empty bag of wind.
The interview definitely didn't go the way Maddow had anticipated.

So McGahn has given 30 hrs of interviews to Mueller, with waivers on both EP ACP in place, and the left thinks they've got him this time? Again?

Andrew McCarthy seemed pretty fascinated that the POTUS would waive those rights like that, called it unprecedented. Doocy chimed in everything that POTUS does is unprecedented.

Michael Cohen time again!

Quote:

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Michael Cohen, President Trump's former personal lawyer, may be charged by the end of August for committing bank fraud in excess of $20 million related to the taxi businesses owned by him and his family, according to a report Sunday.

Federal prosecutors in New York are investigating whether Cohen misrepresented how much his assets were worth to obtain loans in December 2014 from Sterling National Bank and the Melrose Credit Union, the New York Times reports. They are also inquiring into whether Cohen mishandled or misreported his income to the Internal Revenue Service.

---

Remember the good ol' days when banks were the ones accused of "predatory loan practices" by giving loans to people who didn't qualify? I 'member.

Back to Cohen:

Quote:

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In addition to possible bank and tax fraud, the prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York are reportedly probing whether Cohen, Trump's longtime fixer, violated any campaign laws by negotiating nondisclosure agreements with women claiming to have had extramarital affairs with then-candidate Trump before the 2016 election.

---

Whup-to-freakin'-do. Pay a fine if there was a campaign finance violation like everyone has. $130,000 is chicken feed in the campaign finance world. That doesn't even qualify one as a premier donor.

Quote:

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The New York-led investigation, conducted in conjunction with the FBI and IRS, was prompted after they received a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller's federal Russia probe. The new details regarding the inquiry follow Cohen's business partner, Evgeny Freidman, agreeing in May to cooperate with prosecutors after pleading guilty to single count of evading $50,00 worth of taxes.

---

Hhhmm. Cohen was named in the Steele Dossier. Possibility that there was a Title I FISA warrant on him is better than 50-50, in my view. That's troublesome. Outsourcing that to the SDNY may remove the taint with a parallel construction, OTOH, it may not.

Quote:

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The existence or status of a potential plea deal with Cohen is unknown, but the former Trump Organization employee has indicated that his first loyalty is to his family and the country as opposed to his ex-boss. Cohen's shifting loyalty has concerned Trump advisers as Mueller's team presses on with its investigation.

---

Link

Gee, where have seen this before? Team Mueller sweating someone to pressure them to turn on Trump?

aggiehawg said:

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Michael Cohen time again!

Quote:

---

Michael Cohen, President Trump's former personal lawyer, may be charged by the end of August for committing bank fraud in excess of $20 million related to the taxi businesses owned by him and his family, according to a report Sunday.

Federal prosecutors in New York are investigating whether Cohen misrepresented how much his assets were worth to obtain loans in December 2014 from Sterling National Bank and the Melrose Credit Union, the New York Times reports. They are also inquiring into whether Cohen mishandled or misreported his income to the Internal Revenue Service.

---

Remember the good ol' days when banks were the ones accused of "predatory loan practices" by giving loans to people who didn't qualify? I 'member.

Back to Cohen:

Quote:

---

In addition to possible bank and tax fraud, the prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York are reportedly probing whether Cohen, Trump's longtime fixer, violated any campaign laws by negotiating nondisclosure agreements with women claiming to have had extramarital affairs with then-candidate Trump before the 2016 election.

---

Whup-to-freakin'-do. Pay a fine if there was a campaign finance violation like everyone has. $130,000 is chicken feed in the campaign finance world. That doesn't even qualify one as a premier donor.

Quote:

---

The New York-led investigation, conducted in conjunction with the FBI and IRS, was prompted after they received a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller's federal Russia probe. The new details regarding the inquiry follow Cohen's business partner, Evgeny Freidman, agreeing in May to cooperate with prosecutors after pleading guilty to single count of evading $50,00 worth of taxes.

---

Hhhmm. Cohen was named in the Steele Dossier. Possibility that there was a Title I FISA warrant on him is better than 50-50, in my view. That's troublesome. Outsourcing that to the SDNY may remove the taint with a parallel construction, OTOH, it may not.

Quote:

---

The existence or status of a potential plea deal with Cohen is unknown, but the former Trump Organization employee has indicated that his first loyalty is to his family and the country as opposed to his ex-boss. Cohen's shifting loyalty has concerned Trump advisers as Mueller's team presses on with its investigation.

---

Link

Gee, where have seen this before? Team Mueller sweating someone to pressure them to turn on Trump?

---

etcetera will be along shortly to remind you to read the May 2017 Rosenstein Memo...

LOL. You may be right about that.

Rosenstein's appointment letter in May is not the controlling document on the scope of Mueller's investigation. If it were, Rosenstein would not have felt compelled to amend it in his (formerly) secret (and still heavily redacted) August 2, 2017 Memo. The only outsider who has read that memo is Judge Ellis. And he had to browbeat Team Mueller to get it.

Interesting thing about that hearing and the recently completed trial. Who was missing from Team Mueller? Michael Dreeben who had his ass handed to him by Ellis over the same memo. He wasn't within a mile of that Virginia courtroom for the trial from all press reports.

Quote:

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He wasn't within a mile of that Virginia courtroom for the trial from all press reports.

---

He CAN learn.

SpreadsheetAg said:

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Quote:

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He wasn't within a mile of that Virginia courtroom for the trial from all press reports.

---

He CAN learn.

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Dreeben's claim to fame is appellate work. He has argued a ton of cases before SCOTUS. He's not a trial lawyer.

There's a difference and it was clear from the number of times Judge Ellis caught him flat-footed and stumbling over his words. When Dreeben was reduced to the argumentative equivalent of I-could-tell-you-but-then-I'd-have-to-kill-you before a federal judge long accustomed to conducting espionage and CIPA cases, is when he lost it.

Jury is back deliberating this morning, correct?

Yes.

RoscoePColtrane said:

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So McGahn has given 30 hrs of interviews to Mueller, with waivers on both EP ACP in place, and the left thinks they've got him this time? Again?

Andrew McCarthy seemed pretty fascinated that the POTUS would waive those rights like that, called it unprecedented. Doocy chimed in everything that POTUS does is unprecedented.

---

From a lawyer's standpoint, yes that type of cooperation seems counter-intuitive. The politics of appearing to thwart Mueller's investigation by refusing to cooperate (even if on solid Executive Privilege grounds) outweighed the legal considerations in the early going. That decision may or may not have prolonged the investigation, we'll never know.

But what that degree of cooperation did do was to lessen the chances of Trump being compelled by subpoena to testify. One of the threshold questions would be the necessity for Trump to testify because Mueller had no other avenues to discover the information sought. After 32 White House affiliated witnesses and 1.4 million documents that's a higher hurdle to clear, in my view.

Was that the original strategy or just a happy by-product? IDK.

RoscoePColtrane said:

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This sumbeach ought to be in full halo and back brace from this 180 flip

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What a d-bag

Whether intentional or not, you know it's led to frantic discussions among each side over what who sitting by whom means!

BMX Bandit said:

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Whether intentional or not, you know it's led to frantic discussions among each side over what who sitting by whom means!

---

Oh you betcha! After that many weeks the lawyers have the gut instincts on which jurors are possible 'friendlies' and which are not.

You two are gabbing like a bunch of housewives who haven't missed an episode of Days of Our Lives in 20+ years.

BMX Bandit said:

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Whether intentional or not, you know it's led to frantic discussions among each side over what who sitting by whom means!

---

And I would love to be on a jury like that and get some folks to intentionally rearrange just to F with the attorneys.

Wildcat said:

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You two are gabbing like a bunch of housewives who haven't missed an episode of Days of Our Lives in 20+ years.

---

More like As the Jury Turns.

A primer on voir dire:

aggiehawg said:

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Wildcat said:

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You two are gabbing like a bunch of housewives who haven't missed an episode of Days of Our Lives in 20+ years.

---

More like As the Jury Turns.

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On the Edge of Verdict .

https://www.weeklystandard.com/eric-felten/bruce-ohr-security-clearance-why-does-the-nyt-consider-the-once-senior-official-a-midlevel-government-worker

Even the Weekly Standard is going after the NYT.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/08/20/newt-gingrich-muellers-fatal-mistake.html

Quote:

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Newt Gingrich: Mueller's fatal mistake

There is now no excuse for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to ask to interview President Trump.

In fact, it is now clear the investigators have been given so much information about the president's actions and had such remarkably open access, they should just close shop and write their final report.

They no longer have any grounds for going to court to get a subpoena to compel the president to testify.
Mueller's fatal mistake was revealed Saturday in The New York Times story titled, "White House Counsel, Don McGahn, Has Cooperated Extensively in Mueller Inquiry." Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman reported that there were at least 30 hours of interviews between the Mueller team and the White House Counsel.
Don McGahn asserted throughout the interviews that "he never saw Mr. Trump go beyond his legal authorities."

McGahn's cooperation is historically unique because President Trump waived both executive privilege and attorney-client privilege. President Trump was so confident of his innocence that he waived both of these protections to allow the Special Counsel to thoroughly question the White House attorney.

Quote:

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We are now at the end of the failed investigation....

---

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God I hope so, what a debacle

Begging him to let him depose him for three or four days.

This whole damn thing gets more and more bizarre as every day passes by.

They never thought she would lose!

RoscoePColtrane said:

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To John Brennan:
Today President Trump granted our request (Jay Sekulow and me) to handle your case. After threatening if you don't it would be just like Obama's red lines. Come on John you're not a blowhard?

---

Bwhahahaha .... gasp .... Bwhahahaha

That's is why the Obama Administration was in meltdown right after the election, then in a mass apnic to cover their tracks. The fact that with 17 days left in office Obama makes a radical change to EO 12333 directly affecting surveillance and raw intelligence, permitting the N.S.A. to disseminate "raw signals intelligence information more broadly,"

Lynch signed the new rules on Jan. 3 2017, after the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., signed them on Dec. 15 2017. There is now way to square a move like that, other than to accelerate the coverup. Why that very move right there isn't being in flashing bright lights daily is betong me. Up to that point they had been unmasking american citizens at 300 times the normal rate, and the people doing the unmasking were very unusual. There is zero reason for Samantha Powers to be unmasking Americans from 702 intercepts. SHe was the Ambassador to the UN in NYC, WTF is she doing unmasking raw intelligence on Americans?

Previously, the N.S.A. filtered and masked information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A., F.B.I. D.E.A. etc. The N.S.A.'s analysts passed on only information they deemed pertinent, masking out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information, suddenly with 17 days left in office, other intelligence agencies were able to search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the N.S.A. and then apply their own rules for "minimizing" privacy intrusions. Another words the set the 4th amendment on fire basically.

This move has been completely lost in all the white noise. EO 12333 needs to be challenged in court and get some solid legislation put in place to stop this from being changed so easily.

RoscoePColtrane said:

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---

Dammit!!!!! This means 10 more liberals and rinos will sign that letter protesting Cry baby Brennan losing his-top secret super special decoder ring clearance.

RoscoePColtrane said:

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Begging him to let him depose him for three or four days.

---

Rudy from the top rope!!

Agreed, 12333 needs to be cleaned up by court review of 4th amendment implications or legislation. The problem is "useful" precedent has been set with it for the party in power to spy on its opposition with the thinnest of pretexts and then farm that data out to any interested federal law enforcement or security entity. I suspect that the party in power wants to keep that unethical if not unlawful power to use it, not caring about the long term implications so much. It needs to be fixed.

The scary part about that change to 12333 is that the NSA apparently has few effective procedures to track who was accessing what and when.

The only way to get the public on board with reforming FISA and associated SOPs is for Trump to declassify all FISA warrants on American citizens from 2012 through 2017. If, as you and I have long speculated, there were FISA warrants on Manafort, Cohen, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Papadopoulus and others and those warrants were used to build criminal cases against them, even the ACLU will blanch. I also wouldn't be in the least bit surprised to see the names of a few Congress Critters, Senators and members of the press. Then the press will have a dilemma.

And as an added bonus, every idiot that has supported Brennan by signing that letter will not only have egg on their faces but many of them would be implicated by participating in such illegality.

To those who would wail and gnash their teeth that anti-terrorism and law enforcement would suffer if FISA was restricted in any way, I would say if we abandon our Constitutional rights in the name of security, we deserve neither. (With apologies to Benjamin Franklin.)

Disclaimer: After 9/11, I supported the Patriot Act. I no longer do so and am ashamed at my short sightedness for the potential abuses.