Deeply corrupt FBI and DOJ tried to throw 2016 election and derail new administration using taxpayer dollars, forced every taxpayer to finance and legitimize unproven memos provided by a foreign national in desperate attempt to sell Russia scare Clinton campaign opposition research for two purposes: to incite US taxpayer support for war with Russia and to ease humiliation of Obama and Hillary at Trump win-Disobedient Media, Kenneth Whittle...(NY Times: Trump win was "repudiation, not only of Mrs. Clinton, but of President Obama." 11/9/2016)

"While it is extremely disconcerting that the government willfully concealed the existence of their financial relationship with Steele, a foreign national, what is more troubling is the fact that the government used tax payer dollars to do so. In other words, every single American who did not vote for Hillary Clinton, whether they voted for Trump or a third party candidate or did not vote at all – were forced to finance the Clinton campaign-funded opposition research....The public’s tax dollars were spent on creating fake “evidence” to tie Trump with Russia, a false narrative that put the planet at heightened risk for nuclear war, for the sake of the Clinton’s hurt feelings. Why the media refuses to mention or cover this fact, this author does not know. But this is an extremely important fact that every American, whether left, right, up, down, should remember, as it is the perfect example of the corruption which exists within our tax payer-funded institutions, which we are told to have nothing but the utmost respect for."..."The results amounted to a repudiation, not only of Mrs. Clinton, but of President Obama, whose legacy is suddenly imperiled." NY Times, 11/9/2016 

2/4/18, "Nunes Memo Details Weaponization of FISA Court for Political Advantage," Disobedient Media, Kenneth Whittle

"On Friday, the much anticipated “Nunes Memo” was finally released to the general public. Disobedient Media previously reported on the push to prevent the memo from being released. While there is much contained in the four pages, the most glaring issue contained in the memo is the FBI’s willful concealment of pertinent details of which they were required by law to turn over to the FISA court when seeking the initial surveillance warrant on Carter Page, a former volunteer foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign.

According to the memo, former director James Comey signed three FISA applications on behalf of the FBI. Additionally, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente, and acting Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, each signed one or more applications on behalf of the DOJ.

Under 50 U.S.C. § 1805(d)(1), a FISA order on an American citizen must be renewed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) every 90 days. In order to protect the rights of Americans, each subsequent renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause. This means that the in order to be granted a renewal, the government is required to produce all material and relevant facts to the court, including any information which may be potentially favorable to the target of the FISA application.

On four separate occasions the Obama administration essentially claimed before the FISA court that Page had betrayed his country by working for a hostile foreign nation, and therefore it was necessary that the government violate his Fourth Amendment rights."...

[Ed. note: FISA warrant was in effect for almost a year beginning Oct. 21, 2016 through Oct. 2017. Initial warrant was renewed 3 times. Two were signed after Obama left office. Total of 4 warrants at 90 days each. "Former FBI director James Comey signed one of the three renewal applications on behalf of the FBI, and McCabe signed one. Then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, then-acting-DAG Dana Beonte, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed at least one or more of these renewal applications on behalf of the DOJ."] 

(continuing): "However, in this case, the government purposely withheld relevant information from the government not once, but four separate times.

According to the memo, at no time during the initial application process for the warrant to surveil Page, or in any of the three renewals of that application, did the government disclose to the FISA Court the nature of their relationship with Christopher Steele, his relationship with the Democratic National Committee (DNC), or his relationship with the Clinton campaign. Instead, the memo simply, yet vaguely states that, “Steele was working for a named U.S. person.”

Instead, the government purposefully withheld information from the court that the “dossier” compiled by Steele was done so on behalf of the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was further withheld from the court that the DNC had paid Steele over $160,000 for his work in compiling this “dossier”, and that the money was funneled to Steele through the law firm Perkins Coie, which represents both the Hillary Clinton campaign as well as the DNC in legal matters. According to the National Review, the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid at least $9.1 million to Perkins Coie from mid-2015 to late 2016.

The government further held from the court the fact that the FBI had authorized payments to Steele. According to the New York Post, in October 2016 the FBI contracted to pay Steele $50,000 to “help corroborate the dirt on Trump.”

In March of 2017, CNN also reported that the FBI had entered into an arrangement with Steele, whereby they agreed to cover all of his expenses.

While it is extremely disconcerting that the government willfully concealed the existence of their financial relationship with Steele, a foreign national, what is more troubling is the fact that the government used tax payer dollars to do so. In other words, every single American who did not vote for Hillary Clinton, whether they voted for Trump or a third party candidate or did not vote at all – were forced to finance the Clinton campaign-funded opposition research. 

In other words, the public's tax dollars were spent on creating fake "evidence" to tie Trump with Russia, a false narrative that put the planet at heightened risk for nuclear war, for the sake of the Clinton’s hurt feelings.

Why the media refuses to mention or cover this fact, this author does not know. But this is an extremely important fact that every American, whether left, right, up, down, should remember, as it is the perfect example of the corruption which exists within our tax payer-funded institutions, which we are told to have nothing but the utmost respect for.

According to the memo, in an effort to corroborate Steele’s dossier, the FBI extensively cited a September 23, 2016, Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, titled “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin”, which focuses on (Carter) Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow. However, when presenting this article to the court the FBI falsely assessed that Steele did not provide this information directly to Isikoff. Meaning that the FBI was aware that the article they presented to the court was not corroborating evidence from a separate source, because the information in the article was provided to Isikoff by Steele himself. In fact, as the memo points out, Steele himself has stated in British court filings that in September 2016 he met with Yahoo News, as well as several other outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Yorker.

What’s more, in an article published on January 12, 2017, Isikoff reports on a story by the Wall Street Journal in which Christopher Steele is identified as the author [compiler] of the infamous dossier, and even notes that Steele was an “FBI asset”.  However, what is most striking about this article is the fact that despite receiving the information which served as the basis for his own article in September, Isikoff pretends to have not known that Steele was the source of the dossier."... 

[Ed. note: "Isikoff was shocked, he said, because his very article was based on information that came from Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier. He said it was “a bit beyond me” that the FBI would use his article in the FISA application. “Obviously the information that I got from Christopher Steele was information the FBI already had,” he said, noting that Steele began sharing information from his dossier in July 2016. Isikoff acknowledged the potential problem with the DOJ and FBI citing his article to support the FISA against Page. “It’s self-referential,” he said of the article and its reliance on the dossier. “My story is about the FBI’s own investigation,” he continued. “So it seems a little odd that they would be citing the Yahoo! News story about the matter that they are investigating themselves based on the same material that had been separately presented to the FBI before I was ever briefed by Christopher Steele.” The Republican spy memo makes a similar argument. “This article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from the information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo! News,” it reads. It also asserts that the Page FISA application “incorrectly assesses” that Steele was not a source for Isikoff....An FBI unit that tried to verify Steele’s research had determined that it was only “minimally corroborated” at the time the FISA warrant was granted....Isikoff said that he wonders whether the Republican memo accurately characterized the FISA application or whether the FBI/DOJ were trying to “dress up” the document. The latter scenario would be “embarrassing” for U.S. officials, he said. Isikoff’s article was not considered a bombshell when it was published, though the Clinton campaign did tout it in a press release. The report did not initially gain much traction on cable news or with other major outlets, but it has picked up attention over the past year."...2/2/18, Daily Caller

(continuing): "Even more interesting is the close relationship Isikoff had with the DNC during the 2016 Presidential election. According to an email from the DNC released by by Wikileaks, Isikoff attended the “Open World Society’s forum” as the guest of DNC official and Ali Chalupa. 

In the email, Chalupa states that she was invited to the forum to speak specifically about Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager for Donald Trump. Chalupa goes on to state that she has been working with Isikoff for the past few weeks and that at the event, she was able to get him “connected him to the Ukrainians.” 

She adds: 

“I invited Michael Isikoff whom I’ve been working with for the past few weeks and connected him to the Ukrainians. More offline tomorrow since there is a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I’m working on you should be aware of.” 

According to the memo, Steele’s relationship with the FBI as a source continued until late October 2016, when he was terminated for what the FBI defines as the most serious violations, “an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI”. This unauthorized disclosure occurred in an October 30, 2016, Mother Jones article by David Corn, the reporter who broke the infamous Mitt Romney “47 Percent” story.

Again, the FBI did not notify the court that Steele was leaking information to media outlets, or that he was terminated by the FBI after doing so for the second time.

Before and after his termination, Steele maintained contact with then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, whose wife, Nellie Ohr, was employed by Fusion GPS. Ohr would later tell the FBI in an interview in September 2016, that Steele had stated that he, “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.”

Lastly, the memo also reveals that the Steele dossier was so crucial to the investigation, that Deputy Director McCabe testified in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information. This admission by the former Deputy Director is damning, as it proves that, if it were not for the Clinton campaign and DNC funded dossier created by a foreign national, there would have been no surveillance of (Carter) Page, and ultimately there would have never been a special counsel appointed.

At the end of the day, every American, regardless of their position on the political spectrum, should be worried about the fact that the FBI and DOJ sought and were granted a warrant to spy on an opposing political campaign based on a document that the FBI itself had neither verified or corroborated. If the FISA court does in fact employ strict “safeguards” and procedures in order to ensure that the rights of American citizens are not being systematically violated, how is it that the FBI and DOJ were able to obtain a surveillance warrant based on unverified allegations? And why did Congress overwhelmingly vote to reauthorize Section 702?"

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Added: More on Ms. Ali Chalupa: "One of the key media sources who blamed the DNC hacks on Russia, ramping up fears of crypto-Putinist infiltration, is a Ukrainian-American lobbyist working for the DNC." Detail: There can be no removal of Putin by force as Ms. Chalupa et al. desire unless US taxpayers are forced to pay for it.

12/7/2016, "The Anonymous Blacklist Promoted by the Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA Spying," AlterNet, Mark Ames 

"Digging deeper into the PropOrNot controversy."

(subhead): "The DNC’s Ukrainian ultra-nationalist researcher cries treason"

"Because the PropOrNot blacklist of American journalist “traitors” is anonymous, and the Washington Post front-page article protects their anonymity, we can only speculate on their identity with what little information they’ve given us. And that little bit of information reveals only a Ukrainian ultranationalist thread—the salute, the same obsessively violent paranoia towards Russia, and towards journalists, who in the eyes of Ukrainian nationalists have always been dupes and stooges, if not outright collaborators, of Russian evil.

One of the key media sources who blamed the DNC hacks on Russia, ramping up fears of crypto-Putinist infiltration, is a Ukrainian-American lobbyist working for the DNC. She is Alexandra Chalupa—described as the head of the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research on Russia and on Trump, and founder and president of the Ukrainian lobby group “US United With Ukraine Coalition”, which lobbied hard to pass a 2014 bill increasing loans and military aid to Ukraine, imposing sanctions on Russians, and tightly aligning US and Ukraine geostrategic interests.

In October of this year, Yahoo News named Chalupa one of “16 People Who Shaped the 2016 Election” for her role in pinning the DNC leaks on Russian hackers, and for making the case that the Trump campaign was under Kremlin control. “As a Democratic Party consultant and proud Ukrainian-American, Alexandra Chalupa was outraged last spring when Donald Trump named Paul Manafort as his campaign manager,” the Yahoo profile began. “As she saw it, Manafort was a key figure in advancing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agenda inside her ancestral homeland — and she was determined to expose it.”

Chalupa worked with veteran reporter Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News to publicize her opposition research on Trump, Russia and Paul Manafort, as well as her many Ukrainian sources. In one leaked DNC email earlier this year, Chalupa boasts to DNC Communications Director Luis Miranda that she brought Isikoff to a US-government [ie, taxpayer] sponsored Washington event featuring 68 Ukrainian journalists, where Chalupa was invited “to speak specifically about Paul Manafort.” In turn, Isikoff named her as the key inside source “proving” that the Russians were behind the hacks, and that Trump’s campaign was under the spell of Kremlin spies and sorcerers.

(In 2008, when I broke the story about the Manafort-Kremlin ties in The Nation with Ari Berman, I did not go on to to accuse him or John McCain, whose campaign was being run by Manafort’s partner, of being Manchurian Candidates under the spell of Vladimir Putin. Because they weren’t; instead, they were sleazy, corrupt, hypocritical politicians who followed money and power rather than principle. A media hack feeding frenzy turned Manafort from what he was—a sleazy scumbag—into a fantastical Kremlin mole, forcing Manafort to resign from the Trump campaign, thanks in part to kompromat material leaked by the Ukrainian SBU, successor to the KGB.)

Meanwhile, Chalupa’s Twitter feed went wild accusing Trump of treason—a crime that carries the death penalty. Along with well over 100 tweets hashtagged #TreasonousTrump Chalupa repeatedly asked powerful government officials and bodies like the Department of Justice to investigate Trump for the capital crime of treason. In the weeks since the election, Chalupa has repeatedly accused both the Trump campaign and Russia of rigging the elections, demanding further investigations.

According to The Guardian, Chalupa recently sent a report to Congress proving Russian hacked into the vote count, hoping to initiate a Congressional investigation. ["What if Alexandra Chalupa’s report now on its way to Congress presents compelling evidence that the election was hacked?" 11/29/2016]. In an interview with Gothamist, Chalupa described alleged Russian interference in the election result as “an act of war.”

To be clear, I am not arguing that Chalupa is behind PropOrNot. 

But it is important to provide context to the boasts by PropOrNot about its Ukrainian nationalist links—within the larger context of the Clinton campaign’s anti-Kremlin hysteria, which crossed the line into Cold War xenophobia time and time again, an anti-Russian xenophobia shared by Clinton’s Ukrainian nationalist allies. To me, it looks like a classic case of blowback: A hyper-nationalist group whose extremism happens to be useful to American geopolitical ambitions, and is therefore nurtured to create problems for our competitor. Indeed, the US has cultivated extreme Ukrainian nationalists as proxies for decades, since the Cold War began."...






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