Katie Pavlich reports at Townhall:

Eleven House Republicans have sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray officially referring Hillary Clinton, fired FBI Director James Comey, fired Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch for criminal investigation. FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were caught sending hundreds of anti-Trump text messages during the Clinton investigation, have also been referred for criminal investigation.

U.S. Attorney John Huber, who was tapped by Sessions a few weeks ago to investigate the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email probe, was copied on the request.

“Because we believe that those in positions of high authority should be treated the same as every other American, we want to be sure that the potential violations of law outlined below are vetted appropriately,” lawmakers wrote.

As the letter outlines, Comey is under fire for allegedly giving false testimony to Congress last summer about the FBI’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s repeated mishandling of classified information. Specifically, lawmakers cite Comey’s decision to draft an exoneration memo of Clinton months before FBI agents were done with their work and before Clinton and key staffers were interviewed for the probe. They’re also going after him for leaking classified information to a friend, which Comey admitted to under oath.

“It would appear that former Director Comey leaked classified information when sharing these memos with Professor Richman. Accordingly, we refer James Comey to DOJ for potential violation(s) of: 18 USC 641, 18 USC 793, and 18USC 1924 (a),” the letter states.

Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch is being referred for allegedly “threatening with reprisal the former FBI informant who tried to come forward in 2016 with insight into the Uranium One deal”.

“With regard to top counterintelligence FBI agent, Peter Strzok, and senior FBI lawyer Lisa Page, we raise concerns regarding their interference in the Hillary Clinton investigation regarding her use of a personal email server,” the letter states.

McCabe has been referred for perceived violation of three different codes after a DOJ inspector general report released last week showed he lied under oath multiple times to FBI and OIG investigators.

As far as Clinton’s referral, lawmakers argue she should be held accountable for “disguising payments to Fusion GPS on mandatory disclosures to the Federal Election Commission.”

At the very least! She surely has much more to answer for.

Will Sessions and Wray do what they’re asked to do?

It’s a happy day, but not yet time to celebrate. The guilty must be found guilty, and heavy sentences must be pronounced upon them.

Our editorial mind is closed to any possibility of their innocence.

Our rule of skepticism is suspended.

May this be the beginning of a wave of justice that will overwhelm them.

… who exploited them, cheated them, robbed them, mocked them, and seriously endangered them, the government, and the nation.

It’s not fake news. It really happened.

From the Daily Caller, April 1, 2018:

Every one of the 44 House Democrats who hired Pakistan-born IT aides who later allegedly made “unauthorized access” to congressional data appears to have chosen to exempt them from background checks, according to congressional documents.

All of them appear to have waived background checks on Imran Awan and his family members, even though the family of server administrators could collectively read all the emails and files of 1 in 5 House Democrats, and despite background checks being recommended for such positions, according to an inspector general’s report.  But it also includes a loophole allowing them to simply say that another member vouched for them.

No background checks? So what sort of people were the Awans? What could have been found out about them? What reputations did they have?

Among the red flags in Abid’s background were a $1.1 million bankruptcy; six lawsuits against him or a company he owned; and at least three misdemeanor convictions including for DUI and driving on a suspended license, according to Virginia court records. Public court records show that Imran and Abid operated a car dealership, referred to the CIA, that took $100,000 from an Iraqi government official who is a fugitive from U.S. authorities. Numerous members of the family were tied to cryptic LLCs [Limited Liability Companies] such as New Dawn 2001, operated out of Imran’s residence, Virginia corporation records show. Imran was the subject of repeated calls to police by multiple women [complaining of abuse] and had multiple misdemeanor convictions for driving offenses, according to court records.

How did they exploit their position and betray the trust reposed in them?

If a screening had caught those, what officials say happened next might have been averted. The House inspector general reported on Sept. 20, 2016, that shortly before the election members of the group were logging into servers of members they didn’t work for, logging in using congressmen’s personal usernames, uploading data off the House network, and behaving in ways that suggested “nefarious purposes” and that “steps are being taken to conceal their activity”.

A pair of closely-held reports on Imran Awan, his brothers Abid and Jamal, his wife Hina Alvi, and his friend Rao Abbas, said, “the shared employees have not been vetted (e.g. background check).”

Were they highly qualified and thoroughly experienced?

No.

“Shared employees” means they were all hired as part-time, individual employees by individual members, cobbling together $165,000 salaries. Jamal began making that salary at only 20 years old, according to House payroll records; Abid never went to college, his stepmother said; and Rao Abbas’ most recent job experience was being fired from McDonald’s, according to his roommate. (“Whether they had formal training or not, they were trained on the job by Imran,” one of Imran’s lawyers said.)

Who first brought them into the confidence of the House Democrats?

Among the 44 employers, the primary advocate for the suspects has been Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, who  … was also chair of the Democratic National Committee when Wikileaks published its emails. (The Wikileaks emails show that DNC aides called Imran when they needed the password to her device.) Since then, she and other Democrats have described cyber breaches in the strongest possible terms, such as “an act of war” and “an assault on our democracy.”

But there is no indication Democrats put those concerns into practice when they entrusted the Pakistani dual citizens with their data, nor when suspicious activity was detected.

Once the crooks had been rumbled, did the Dems who’d employed them at least  take immediate steps to find out how much damage they’d done and repair it as best they could?

Well, Debbie didn’t. She kept Imran in his job.

Police banned the suspects from the network after the IG report, but Wasserman Schultz kept Imran on staff anyway. He was in the building and in possession of a laptop with the username RepDWS months later, according to an April 6, 2017 police report.

Was there no security policy that could have prevented this outrage, or at least discovered it sooner?

The House security policy, HISPOL16, says “House Offices shall… ensure background checks, as defined in this policy, have been conducted on Privileged Users”. It includes quarterly reviews of privileged accounts’ appropriateness. By the time the policy was enacted, some members had dropped the Awans for assorted reasons …

What reasons? None given, except –

… including Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona in early 2015 for what her spokesperson called “incompetence”. 

So they weren’t even competent at the job they were paid to do by the Representatives? Kyrsten Sinema may not have been able to judge that. “Incompetence” was probably just her excuse for dismissing the Awans. The real reason seems to be was that she was afraid of them. So were they all – all  the Democratic Representatives who irresponsibly entrusted their computers to the Awan gang.  

… The Daily Caller News Foundation reached out to all 44 members, and none disputed that they had not conducted a background check. Not a single one of the 44 would say which of their colleagues vouched for the Awans, nor stated what criteria they used to determine that it was prudent to give them access to all their data.

Besides Wasserman Schultz, Imran has longstanding personal relationships with Reps. Gregory Meeks and Marcia Fudge of New York, Politico reported.

“Personal relationships”? He was their friend?

Employers also include Rep. Ted Lieu of California on the Foreign Affairs Committee and three members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence: Reps. Andre Carson of Indiana, Jackie Speier of California and Joaquin Castro of Texas. …

Two of their employers said not a word when they were robbed by the Awans.

The Awans’ employers also included Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York, who saw $120,000 in computer equipment disappear under Abid Awan’s watch but “wrote off” the taxpayer funds rather than make an issue of it, according to the IG report and multiple senior government officials.

Xavier Becerra, now attorney general of California, ran the House Democratic Caucus, and his server was physically stolen shortly after the IG report named it as evidence in a hacking probe, three senior government officials said.

But wait, there’s more:

The Daily Caller reported on October 2, 2017:

A now-indicted IT aide to various House Democrats was sending money and gifts to government officials in Pakistan and received protection from the Pakistani police, multiple relatives claim.

A Democratic aide also said Imran Awan personally bragged to him that he could have people tortured in Pakistan. Awan’s lawyer acknowledged that he was sending money to a member of the Faisalabad police department, but said there was a good explanation.

The relatives said Awan and his brothers were also sending IT equipment, such as iPhones, to the country during the same period in which fraudulent purchase orders for that equipment were allegedly placed in the House, and in which congressional equipment apparently went missing.

Awan’s stepmother, Samina Gilani, said the brothers were paying police officer Azhar Awan and that he is their cousin.

Facebook confirms that Azhar works for the police and is Facebook “friends” with the former congressional aides, who worked for 45 Democratic House members until the aides were banned Feb. 2, following the discovery of 5,400 unauthorized logins to congressional servers and the funneling of “massive” amounts of data off the congressional network. …

A fellow Democratic House IT aide … recounted a conversation between Awan and three colleagues in a House cafeteria several years ago in which Awan seemed to relish bragging about his ability to have people harassed in Pakistan.

“He wanted to build a CRM [customer relationship management software] but he wanted to do it in Pakistan,” the aide told TheDCNF. “But the government doesn’t allow that. They have to be American, but Imran said, ‘Well, we can say that they’re American, but really they’ll be in Pakistan. I have these guys that work for the Faisalabad police department, and all we have to do is pay them $100 a month and they take them over to the police station, strip their clothes off, hang them upside down and beat them with a shoe. And that person will work hard and be loyal from then on.’  …

In early 2016, $120,000 in equipment, including iPads, were discovered missing from the office of Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York, for which Abid ran IT. Equipment billed to other congressional offices was shipped to their house, and invoices were falsified to show prices as $499 — just under the cutoff at which equipment would be inventoried by central administrators. …

Awan’s younger brothers Abid and Jamal were also on the House payroll, but have not been charged with any crimes. …

According to one witness:

Imran Awan introduces himself [in Pakistan] as someone from U.S. Congress or federal agencies … [so that he] manages to have police to escort him during his visits to Pakistan.”

But:

The Washington Post reported that the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force was investigating the Awans, but that “according to a senior congressional official familiar with the probe, criminal investigators have found no evidence that the IT workers had any connection to a foreign government”.

If true, that raises questions about how thoroughly agents have probed.

Dan Perrin, a former staffer for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations who had studied foreign actors, told TheDCNF there is a risk that the payments to the local police department signal a relationship to Pakistani authorities, such as the intelligence agency ISI, which he said “often works with or is embedded in the major city police forces in Pakistan.”

While they were working on Capitol Hill, the brothers set up a car dealership that took $100,000 from Ali Al-Attar, an Iraqi politician who has been tied to Hezbollah and is wanted by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Imran Awan has been indicted for fraud in connection with a crooked car-dealership.

Their former business partner, Nasir Khattak, testified in Virginia court that the car dealership’s finances consisted of byzantine transfers in which staff and cars were often swapped between it and a dealership next door. …

Perrin said the family’s numerous car-related LLCs deserve special scrutiny because car dealerships are a favorite front for people with ties to foreign governments, providing the opportunity for money laundering and “giving the owners access to credit reports on all Americans”. 

To sum up: These Pakistani crooks were engaged by Democratic members of Congress, without any enquiry into their background, to “look after” their computers which contained highly confidential information concerned with the protection of Americans. The Democrats never apparently considered the possibility that their data was being stolen and sent to Pakistani authorities. When their hardware was stolen by the crooks – and they knew it was the Awan gang who had stolen it – they did not go to the police. When the FBI did finally arrest Imran Awan on charges of fraud in a car-dealership – and denied that the gang “had any connection with a foreign government” – Imran Awan continued to be on the payroll of Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

The Democrats were putty in the hands of the foreign criminal gang. Helpless as babies. They feared to offend them by reporting them to the police or firing them.

Yet these people, for whom large numbers of Americans voted to represent them in the federal government, want, yearn, ache to rule the country. To conduct US relations with foreign powers. To be in charge of the world’s mightiest military force … 

Theodore Dalrymple, whose many excellent books commenting illuminatingly on our times includes Our Culture, What’s Left Of It, gives this account of how fascist-communist “anti-fascist” Antifa fell violently upon a quiet literary event in the English town of Lewes.

We quote much but not all of it from New English Review. Go here to read the whole thing:

I was to be the penultimate speaker, followed by a controversial conservative journalist, Katie Hopkins, who was to talk about her own recently published memoir, Rude.

The event ended in violence.

The festival organizer … had informed me in advance that there might be trouble from demonstrators who would want to prevent Hopkins from speaking. …

To say that she is unafraid of controversy or criticism is to understate the case. They are her stock-in-trade. …  [A]n outspoken, not to say militant, mocker of current political pieties, she is herself the object of the most severe objurgation, with no allowances made. In debate, she is uncompromising and fearless. …

She appears genuinely not to mind when attacked on television or in print or on social media: she accepts with good grace the fact that, if you express opinions in public, you must expect criticism and detraction, fair or otherwise, though she always returns blow for blow. She laughs at insults. …

Her main mode of defense is always attack …

She has been a severe critic of the Islamization of Britain. She speaks the truth about it. And that is not permitted in Britain now.

So Hopkins is widely regarded as a purveyor of hate speech — utterance that is to be answered by prohibition, rather than by argument. The category of hate speech is disturbingly expandable and depends on the propensity of groups of people to take offense or feel threatened (where it pays to be offended, people will take offense). Certain groups, but not others, are accorded legal or social protection from unpleasant name-calling, as if they were endangered species. …

Considerable efforts were made to bar Hopkins from speaking at the event. When I arrived in Lewes, posters in many windows proclaimed that Lewes wanted no hate speech. A town councillor had argued that the invitation to Hopkins should be withdrawn. The council had the right to ask for this because it owned and ran the venue, a deconsecrated church; and the councillor argued that the demonstration against Hopkins would be so violent that her appearance would constitute a threat to health, safety, and public order. On legal advice, however, that this argument was blatantly political, the council, with not a single Conservative member despite the town’s evident prosperity, voted overwhelmingly for the invitation to stand.

It turned out that the councillor who had argued for the withdrawal of the invitation was sympathetic to the demonstration against Hopkins, so that in essence his argument had been almost a threat: if you do not do as I say, like-minded people will react violently, and since you have been warned, such violence will be your fault. Do as I say, or else: the new democratic principle.

I gave my talk without interruption from the gathering crowd outside, but during the question-and-answer that followed, as Hopkins’s time to speak grew nearer, I heard some banging on the windows, at which fists and angry faces also appeared. Then there was some chanting, but not so loud as to make me inaudible. The trouble really began after I had finished speaking, in the short break before Hopkins was to start. The councillor’s self-fulfilling prophecy was about to come true.

A crowd of perhaps 120 had by now gathered outside the hall. Initially, only two policemen were present. One was pelted with so many eggs that he looked as if someone were planning to make him into an omelet. Eyewitnesses attested that some of the demonstrators handed eggs to children to throw at the police, presumably because the children would be too young to be arrested for assault. At any rate, it is significant that some adults were so determined to prevent Hopkins from speaking that they thought it reasonable and appropriate to bring children to a potentially violent occasion — an occasion, in fact, at which they themselves were prepared to employ violence. This is surely a demonstration of the ability of ideology to induce practical moral blindness.

Some of the demonstrators were masked. They tried to prevent those who had bought a ticket for the event from entering the building. One of those ticket holders subsequently wrote and published an account of what happened when she [and her companion] attempted to gain entrance:

There was a very large and noisy demonstration in the grounds and spilling onto the road, and we were immediately taunted as we made our way to the lynch gate [sic: a Freudian slip, if ever there was one, from lych-gate], despite no one knowing who we were. A militia of masked young men dressed in black tried to prevent us from entering the grounds. At first I thought they were working with the police, controlling the flow to protect attendees from the scuffles ahead, because a couple of policemen were observing at close quarters. One militiaman asked me why I was there. I said to hear Katie. He immediately swore at me, called me a fascist, bounced against me, manhandled me and tried to push me over. I was wearing stilettos and he easily pushed me into a bush, which thankfully cushioned my fall. I said: I have every right to be here. I looked towards a policeman for support, but he turned away, having seen everything. Anthony, who was now a few yards away, came to my side, and we stayed very close from then on as we determinedly made our way through to the church doors. Anthony is visibly Asian/ethnic and was not attacked as I was. Our keeping very close afforded me some protection as the crowd was chanting that it was pro refugees, unlike fascist Hopkins. 

We came to a stop about six feet from the church’s main doors, which were solidly closed. A line of five thugs, a man on a large mobility scooter, and a woman had blocked our path. I tried to reason with the woman, who looked out of place and even a little scared herself, being so petite. She said that people with vile views should not be allowed to speak. I said I thought we fought two world wars to protect free speech. I mentioned that my grandmother’s brother ended up in a concentration camp because he was a French citizen who stood up against the Nazis’ bullying. She maintained the mantra that evil people should not be allowed to spread their filth. There was no reasoning, and I didn’t want to provoke anyone, as we were trapped, and there were calls for Katie’s blood; so, I kept quiet. 

Suddenly, the crowd behind surged, and it looked like we might be in serious danger as eggs were thrown, a placard headed our way, and more militants appeared. Just then a journalist from More Radio appeared at my side. He was immediately denounced as a fascist by one of the thugs, but he brought out a mike and began to interview the most vociferous one, a particularly on-edge individual who looked a cigarette paper away from hurting someone. The ghastly young thug said it was necessary to stop this speech because if it was allowed we would soon become like Nazi Germany and worse.

It was well after the start time by now, and the journalist phoned a colleague and confirmed to us that the event [of Katie’s speech] had been cancelled.

News got around. The protestors chanted their victory. Some cried something like “When she comes out, we’ll get her.” We could hear others asking what to do when Katie appeared. …  The church door opened briefly and protestors surged forward. It was quickly shut. A policeman, who looked terrified, came to the front and spoke into his walkie-talkie, but soon disappeared into the graveyard. We knew we had to get out, as the crowd wanted blood.

We followed the radio journalist, who conducted a tortuous route to safety through the muddy graveyard. Later, on the pavement, when I suggested to him these folks were Momentum [a militant left-wing organization affiliated with the Labour Party], he said he believed they were from Antifa [a militant, ostensibly antifascist, movement that believes in political homeopathy, namely, that the employment of fascist methods will drive out fascism]. He said that most of the protestors were not people from Lewes (where he lived).

While all this was going on, my wife and I, who had intended to leave to catch our train before Hopkins spoke, were trapped inside the hall, having been advised by the egg-covered policeman to wait. The banging and the chanting were now incessant. There were about 40 of us inside to 120 outside. One lady I spoke to was terrified and in tears because she had been separated from her husband by the mob and did not know where he was. One man described how one of the demonstrators said to him that he would let him pass and enter the hall, as if he had the authority in his gift to permit or prohibit. Another lady wished that she had never come. A German lady said that she had come to live in England in 1968 precisely to avoid this kind of thing, which had then seemed so common in Germany. Where had the tolerance and good humor she had known in those days gone?

Some of the demonstrators managed to break into the church using a crowbar. Bouncers provided by a security company (after another such company had pulled out, fearing more serious violence than it could handle) rushed after the intruders. One bouncer suffered a serious injury to his arm, requiring an operation.

Hopkins was smuggled out of the building, the police having advised her, before she was able to speak, that they could not guarantee her safety if she stayed. She tweeted that she had left the building and asked the demonstrators to disperse peacefully. When police reinforcements arrived, somewhat tardily, the people in the hall were escorted under cover of darkness out through a back entrance and through the ancient graveyard. This was no doubt advisable, but, in effect, it turned the law-abiding rather than the lawbreakers into fugitives.

The police made no arrests, despite having been assaulted themselves and witnessed others being assaulted, despite the fact that a building was illegally broken into, despite the fact that 40 people had been falsely imprisoned, despite the fact that threatening language (of a degree likely to make any reasonably firm-minded person afraid for his safety) had been used repeatedly. They failed to protect citizens who were going about their lawful business. To say that they were useless would be an exaggeration: goodness knows what would have happened had they not been there. But they did not carry out their duty with alacrity, and the social media — videos, sound recordings, photographs — that helped to call the mob into being in the first place are now being used to hold the police to account for their passivity in enforcing the law.

The question arising from the episode is how far it was isolated … and how much was it a harbinger of things to come? Certainly, it gave me another lesson in how fragile public order is and how quickly it can break down. …  The Hopkins incident also demonstrates how weak is the attachment to freedom of speech and thought, especially among people so convinced of their own rectitude that they feel entitled — indeed, duty-bound — to silence others. …

As there, so here in America. And all over the West.

Theodore Dalrymple thinks that what happened in Lewes might be one of the early battles of a second Civil War in England, since violence begets violence.

One of the problems of this, apart from its sheer moral and intellectual idiocy, is that it will eventually call forth equal and opposite violence. Thus, the Lewes Speakers Festival would be an episode in the forthcoming English Civil War, the second of that name.

Civil war all over the West?

It is not impossible. It is not even unlikely.

The massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, Florida, was carried out by the psychopath Nikolas Cruz. He was ably assisted by the incompetence of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department under Sheriff Scott Israel. And it was also the result of a policy hatched and implemented by the Obama administration.

Daniel Horowitz writes at Conservative Review:

 It turns out that Broward County has been promoting a program … to incentivize local officials to do everything they can to keep juveniles out of jail. …

That’s what the Broward County “PROMISE” program (Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Supports & Education) did. Not prevent crimes, but prevent young criminals being punished by the law.

Broward County “had the highest number of school-related arrests statewide at 1,062” before Obama began his Common Core-style grant programs for local jailbreak agendas. Once millions of dollars were doled out for juvenile feel-good programs to avoid arrest, such as the PROMISE program, the number of arrests plummeted by 63 percent from 2011-2012 to the 2015-2016 school year. …

Every nook and cranny of the [Obama] federal government’s law enforcement and education programs are filled with a culture of leniency on crime. Up until the very last month of the Obama administration, the Department of Education, along with senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett and former Domestic Policy Council Director Cecilia Muñoz, were promoting “the continuing need to rethink discipline.”

If there was ever an argument for abolishing the Department of Education, the growing concern over school violence and the role of the federal government in pressuring local communities to weaken their disciplinary standards should be the number one reason.

There is certainly [reason] to believe the particular leadership of Broward County was corrupt, incompetent, and even had ties to unindicted co-conspirators with Hamas. … Speaking at a mosque with his Hamas-supporting deputy, Nezar Hamze, Scott Israel said, “I have said over and over again, we have to measure the success of the Broward Sherriff’s office by the kids we keep out of jail, not by the kids we put in jail. We have to give our children second chances and third chances.” Or maybe 45 chances.

That was the number of times the police were called to criminal disturbances at the home of Nikolas Cruz. 45 times! And still he wasn’t arrested and charged.

Lest you think [Scott] Israel is uniquely radical, his statement is the gospel of the bipartisan leniency factions in almost every state.

Amazingly, the entire political class is attempting to expand these programs and apply them at a federal level as well, while decrying guns. Even Rep. Mark Walker, the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, is mindlessly touting vague “criminal justice reform” initiatives as if they are a positive.

Where is the clamor, even on the Right, to end the “reform” of criminal justice rather than attack the Second Amendment? After all, you can’t target the guns going into the wrong hands if you don’t target “the wrong hands” in the first place. The irony is that the bipartisan criminal justice reform agenda will make any background checks moot, particularly for juveniles who escape the entire criminal justice system through programs set up with federal funds, local liberal judges, and Soros-backed NGOs designed to expunge their records and treat them outside the system.

The soft-on-crime crowd can’t have it both ways. They can’t seek tougher laws on guns while seeking lenient laws on the violent criminals. They can’t promote federal policies that incentivize or bully states into putting more names in a NICs database while promoting policies that encourage states to lock up as few criminals as possible. The entire criminal justice “reform” movement has created a culture, pressure, and incentive for cops and county governments to be as lenient as possible when it comes to incarcerating juveniles, the exact opposite of the cultural pressure from the past two decades.

Rather than pandering on gun control while simultaneously promoting jailbreak legislation, Republicans would do better to cut off all funding for jailbreak grant programs through the Department of Justice and Department of Education and call upon Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to rescind all Obama-era memorandums pressuring local school districts to change their methods of discipline.

Paul Mirengoff at Powerline refers to, and quotes, the Horowitz article, and comments:

If law enforcement had retained discretion, there’s a good chance Cruz would have been arrested and/or committed. After all, the sheriff’s department received dozens of credible complaints against him. Some described his violent acts and tendencies, others his threats to shoot up the school. …

Cruz was expelled for bringing weapons to school. And when he got into a fight in September of 2016, he was referred to social workers rather than to the police. Similarly, when he allegedly assaulted a student in January 2017, it triggered a school-based threat assessment, but no police involvement.The Washington Post notes that Cruz “was well-known to school and mental health authorities and was entrenched in the process for getting students help rather than referring them to law enforcement“. …

Sheriff Scott Israel provides a perfect example of the new mentality — the culture of leniency.

Speaking at a mosque, he remarked:

I have said over and over again, we have to measure the success of the Broward Sherriff’s office by the kids we keep out of jail, not by the kids we put in jail. We have to give our children second chances and third chances.

 Unfortunately, Nikolas Cruz’s victims never even had a first chance.

The idea of measuring the success of a law enforcement agency by the number of people not in jail is sheer lunacy. The only valid measurements of success are (1) prevention of crime and (2) apprehension and successful prosecution of criminals. If, instead, we were to measure success by the number of people not in jail, then the most successful sheriffs would be the ones who didn’t arrest anyone, or at least any youths. And the logical way to build on that “success” would be to release those already in custody. …

It’s not enough to condemn Scott Israel as incompetent. His incompetence is only part of the story. The rest of the story is the culture of leniency, enshrined in federal policy, that encouraged Israel’s department to keep Nikolas Cruz free to kill.

And Ann Coulter writes at Townhall:

If Cruz had taken out full-page ads in the local newspapers, he could not have demonstrated more clearly that he was a dangerous psychotic. He assaulted students, cursed out teachers, kicked in classroom doors, started fist fights, threw chairs, threatened to kill other students, mutilated small animals, pulled a rifle on his mother, drank gasoline and cut himself, among other “red flags”.

Over and over again, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School reported Cruz’s terrifying behavior to school administrators, including Kelvin Greenleaf, “security specialist”,  and Peter Mahmood, head of [the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps] JROTC.

At least three students showed school administrators Cruz’s near-constant messages threatening to kill them — e.g., “I am going to enjoy seeing you down on the grass,” “Im going to watch ypu bleed,” “iam going to shoot you dead” — including one that came with a photo of Cruz’s guns. They warned school authorities that he was bringing weapons to school. They filed written reports.

Threatening to kill someone is a felony. …

If Cruz had been charged and jailed, not only would a dangerous criminal have been locked up for a while, but also …

Having a felony record would have prevented him from purchasing a gun. …

Cruz was never arrested. …

Of course, killjoys will say that removing the consequences of bad behavior only encourages more bad behavior. But that’s not the view of Learned Professionals, who took summer courses at Michigan State Ed School.

In a stroke of genius, they realized that the only problem criminals have is that people keep lists of their criminal activities. It’s the list that prevents them from getting into M.I.T. and designing space stations on Mars. Where they will cure cancer.

This primitive, stone-age thinking was made official Broward County policy in a Nov. 5, 2013, agreement titled “Collaborative Agreement on School Discipline.”

The first “whereas” clause of the agreement states that “the use of arrests and referrals to the criminal justice system may decrease a student’s chance of graduation, entering higher education, joining the military and getting a job.”

Get it? It’s the arrest – not the behavior that led to the arrest – that reduces a student’s chance at a successful life. (For example, just look at how much the district’s refusal to arrest Nikolas Cruz helped him!)

The agreement’s third “whereas” clause specifically cites “students of color” as victims of the old, racist policy of treating criminal behavior criminally. …

Just a few months ago, the superintendent of Broward County Public Schools, Robert W. Runcie, was actually bragging about how student arrests had plummeted under his bold leadership.

When he took over in 2011, the district had “the highest number of school-related arrests in the state”. But today, he boasted, Broward has “one of the lowest rates of arrest in the state.” By the simple expedient of ignoring criminal behavior, student arrests had declined by a whopping 78 percent. …

When it comes to spectacular crimes, it’s usually hard to say how it could have been prevented. But in this case, we have a paper trail. In the pursuit of a demented ideology, specific people agreed not to report, arrest or prosecute dangerous students like Nikolas Cruz.

These were the parties to the Nov. 5, 2013, agreement that ensured Cruz would be out on the street with full access to firearms:

Robert W. Runcie, Superintendent of Schools

Peter M. Weinstein, Chief Judge of the 17th Judicial Circuit

Michael J. Satz, State Attorney

Howard Finkelstein, Public Defender

Scott Israel, Broward County Sheriff

Franklin Adderley, Chief of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department

Wansley Walters, Secretary of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice

Marsha Ellison, President of the Fort Lauderdale Branch of the NAACP and Chair of the Juvenile Justice Advisory Board

Nikolas Cruz may be crazy, but the parties to that agreement are crazy, too. They decided to make high school students their guinea pigs for an experiment based on a noxious ideology. The blood of 17 people is on their hands.

And there will be many more victims of the noxious and demented ideology.

… could happen to you wherever you may be in the USA.

It is a story of a public-private partnership in crime that went on for years; of state-sanctioned exploitation of the old; the deprivation of their liberty; abduction, theft, and callous cruelty.

This is a summary, in our own words for the most part, of the true story told by Rachel Aviv and published (somewhat surprisingly to us) in the (usually all too politically correct) New Yorker magazine on October 9, 2017. The original needs to be read in full, so please read it if you have strong nerves and are thoroughly acquainted with injustice and cruelty posing as “caring”. 

Mr. and Mrs. North – Rudy and Rennie – lived in a nice well furnished house they owned in Las Vegas. They were in their seventies, retired. Although Rennie was frail, they both enjoyed life. They  read a lot, Rennie fiction, Rudy philosophy, science and much more. They were both comfortable and happy, though Rennie needed some practical help, which was given by a nurse who came in five days a week.

One Friday in 2013, just as the Norths were finishing their breakfast, the nurse arrived as usual and a few minutes later another woman turned up. She introduced herself as April Parks, a “private professional guardian”. With her were three other people who did not give their names. Parks informed the Norths that she had an order issued by the Clark County Family Court to remove them to “an assisted living facility”, and their consent was not required.  

They protested. The intruders threatened to call the police and have them moved by force. They were given about half an hour to pack a few personal things. In her confusion and distress Rennie forgot to take the cellphone. They were driven away from their home in a car marked “CRT-GRDN” (“Court Guardian”).

Parks returned to the house with another woman, Cindy Breck, whose company – called “Caring Transitions” – “relocates” elderly persons, and arranges the sale of their belongings. Here again, consent was not required. The “relocated” persons were simply robbed of the things they had acquired through their long lives and wanted to keep in their old age. So as soon as the Norths’ had been “transitioned”, all their possessions – their furniture, books, everything they had not been able to fit into the small bags they took with them – were assessed for sale value by caring Cindy Breck. Parks herself took documents (birth certificates, insurance policies) and valuables (a coin collection, a watch).

The Norths’ daughter, Julie Belshe, a fifty-three-year old married woman, with three sons, who ran a business with her husband, arrived as she did almost every day to visit her parents and found them gone and the house locked up. She tried calling their cellphone and got no answer. She called hospitals to enquire if they had been brought in from an accident. She concluded that her father and mother had been kidnapped. She revisited the locked house again later and found a note on the door with the name and number of April Parks, “guardian”, who could be contacted “in case of emergency”. Through Parks Julie learnt that her parents had been taken to a “facility” in Boulder City. Julie protested, “You can’t just walk into somebody’s home and take them!” Parks replied, “It’s legal.”

Julie drove to the facility in Boulder City. There her parents were lodged in a small room with a “kitchenette” and a view of the parking lot. Rennie was in a wheelchair. They had no phone in the room.

Mr. and Mrs. North no longer controlled their own money. Their estates were in the hands of April Parks. Each time Parks looked in on the Norths, however briefly, she charged them a fee “per hour”. How much she deducted from their funds was not limited by the court. She charged $24 for one eight-minute phone call that Julie put through to her.

It gets worse.

Parks applied to Clark County Family Court to have her guardianship of the Norths made permanent. Meet the Clark County guardianship commissioner, Jon Norheim. Officially he works “under a judge”, but what he orders has the weight of a judge’s ruling. Parks made all her guardian applications to Norheim. Norheim granted them – about once a week. The Norths had no one speaking for them. No lawyer represented them. So at the ten minute hearing, the Norths were made permanent wards of the court under Parks’s guardianship for life.

Their possessions were sold by another “transitions” firm, Even Tide Life Transitions. Their 2010 Chrysler was sold for under $8,000. Two Renoir lithographs fetched $3,800. A Brancusi table, $12,050. Other valuable things went for the same sort of song. Some pastel drawings made by their son who had died at the age of thirty-two were crumpled up and thrown away, though Rennie often asked for them. Their cash savings of $50,000 in the Bank of America were transferred into an account in April Parks’s name. 

Similar stories were told by other inmates, ten of whom were also under Parks’s guardianship. Some had been deprived of considerable wealth. They were even deprived of most of their clothes. When Rennie wanted to go shopping for clothes, Parks found out, forbade the expedition, and took $108 as a fee “for the conversation”.

Julie tried to get legal guardianship of her parents. Parks told the court that she was unfit, a “reported addict” who “had no contact” with her parents. Julie had no chance to challenge Parks in court and only found out about the lies much later.

It gets worse still.

Meet Jared Shafer. He is the super Guardian who trains the lesser guardians. He has thousands of wards and estates in his “care”. In 1979 he was appointed “public administrator”, in charge of the estates of county wards for whom no private guardian, such as a relative, was available. In 2003 he set up his own private “guardianship and fiduciary”  business. The racketeering operation was moved over from local government and Jared Shafer to Jared Safer alone – though he still kept his government listed phone number, and still had friends in official positions.

A relative of one of Shafer’s wards, Terry Williams,  took the shocking story of what had happened to her father to the Las Vegas police. She listed 23 statutes that had been violated. But the police returned her statement stamped “Not a police matter”.  Apparently the Las Vegas police never accepted complaints about the treatment of wards.

Next Terry Williams  tried bringing a civil suit against Shafer for racketeering. The US District Court of Central California heard the case in 2009. Terry Williams explained how people were “deemed incompetent” and then had their assets taken away from them.

The US District Court of Central California dismissed the case. Numerous other such cases were also dismissed by district courts.

Jared Shafer goes to some lengths to prevent wards appealing to the courts. One who made it to a hearing found himself before Jon Norheim. He asked to be allowed to live with his daughter. Nevada law requires courts to favor relatives over professional guardians, but Norheim dismissed his appeal. Anecdotes demonstrate how much influence Shafer has over Norheim –  and over  politicians. He boasts, “I wrote the [guardianship] laws”.  It is not untrue. In 1995 he got the Nevada Senate to allow his county (in effect himself?) to be the beneficiary of interest earned on the money of his wards that he invested. Another of “his” laws was one that permitted him – and other public guardians – to take control of wards’ property without a court order.

He restricts visits to confined wards by relatives and life-partners. Months go by without a visit being allowed by him.

He has the power to arbitrarily remove anyone from the position of co-guardian. He managed to do this even to the daughter of a ward who was herself a professional psychiatric nurse and a specialist in geriatric nursing. She appealed – to Norheim – not to have Shafer left as her father’s sole guardian on the grounds that Shafer was abusive. Norheim said he trusted Shafer completely – and dismissed the appeal.

What became of the Norths? Parks changed their health insurance to an insurer of her own choice. Then both Rudy and Rennie were dosed with mind-numbing drugs. Their daughter finally found out what the drugs were when a new director, Julie Liebo, took over the facility and, against Parks’s “orders”, allowed families to be given information about the medical treatment given to the wards. In retaliation Parks threatened the director with arrest and deprivation of her license. And she began to remove her wards from the facility. One who announced with some excitement that she was being allowed to go to a hair salon went out the door and never came back. Another  was “taken away in a van, screaming”. The director tried to get the state to stop this sort of thing happening, but failed. She went to the Clark County Family Court (Norheim?), the Department of Health Services, the Bureau of Health Care, and Nevada Adult Protective Services. “Each agency told her that it didn’t have the authority or the jurisdiction to intervene.”

The turn of the Norths came. Without giving them time to say good-bye to the friends they had made, Parks had them suddenly moved by Caring Transitions (remember Cindy Breck?) to a cheaper facility. When their daughter Julie heard of the plan to move them she rushed to see what was to be done with them, but when she got there they were gone. Julie gave vent to her fury,  shouting at Parks’s assistant Heidi Kramer, “April Parks is a thief.” Kramer called the police. They came, and a police officer told Julie Belshe that she “had no rights”. Julie Liebo, the director, had to admit that was true.

Julie Belshe drove, weeping, to the “cheaper facility” in Las Vegas. But Parks was there and would not let her see her parents. She ordered Julie to go away, and when Julie did not obey she too called the police. Julie tried begging them to let her see her father and mother. Their reply was a citation for trespassing, and a warning that if she came back to the facility they would arrest her.

The Norths had an even smaller room in the new facility. They found themselves among the hopelessly incapacitated. Rennie was dosed with a drug used for the pacification of schizophrenics.

Then Julie Belshe went to the local press. The Voice had already published a warning about Clark County guardians, that they “had been lining their pockets for a very long time”. One of its  editors, Rana Goodman, visited the Norths, and got up a petition demanding that the laws to do with guardianships be changed by the Nevada legislature.

Another paper, the Review-Journal, brought out a report on Jared Shafer and the complaints that had been made against him through many years.

And so, when at last the Norths got to a hearing – before Norheim – the court was full of journalists. Norheim underwent a dramatic change. He found that the Norths’ confiscated possessions had been sold without court permission. (He had let Parks get away with that racket for years.) He also suspended Parks as the Norths’ guardian. That had never happened to her before.

In March 2017, Parks was indicted for theft and perjury among other charges. The extent of the racket she had run came out in a summary of the investigation. “Parks went to hospitals and attorneys’ offices” to “generate more clients”. She had “secured a contract with six medical facilities … to refer patients to her”. She “often gave doctors blank certificates and told them exactly what to write in order for their patients to become her wards”. Needless to say, they were usually the wealthier patients.

April Parks is to go on trial in 2018. But Jared Shafer has not been indicted and “is still listed in the Clark County court system as a trustee and as an administrator”. And Jon Norheim has been merely transferred to another court “where he now oversees cases involving abused and neglected children”.

The Norths now live with their daughter Julie and her husband in California. They have no money. Parks used up all their cash, and all that she derived from the sale of their possessions, on their alleged monthly bills and fees to herself. She would of course have preferred them to be richer, and probably miscalculated what they were worth when she targeted them.

In their room, Rudy and Rennie have two pictures by their son. Julie had fished them out of the trash bags in which Cindy Breck’s Caring Transition staff had dumped them the day she helped “transition” the Norths.

They are restored to psychological health, though Rennie still has nightmares about what happened to them. And their daughter still fears that “guardians” might appear to snatch them away again at any moment.

She is right to fear it.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence today made public a committee memo with information on abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Chairman Nunes issued the following statement:

The Committee has discovered serious violations of the public trust, and the American people have a right to know when officials in crucial institutions are abusing their authority for political purposes. Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies exist to defend the American people, not to be exploited to target one group on behalf of another. It is my hope that the Committee’s actions will shine a light on this alarming series of events so we can make reforms that allow the American people to have full faith and confidence in their governing institutions.

 

January 18, 2018

To: HPSCI Majority Members

From: HPSCI Majority Staff

Subject: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation

Purpose

This memorandum provides Members an update on significant facts relating to the Committee’s ongoing investigation into the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and their use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) during the 2016 presidential election cycle. Our findings, which are detailed below, 1) raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain DOJ and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and 2) represent a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process.

Investigation Update

On October 21, 2016, DOJ and FBI sought and received a FISA probable cause order (not under Title VII) authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISC. Page is a U.S. citizen who served as a volunteer advisor to the Trump presidential campaign. Consistent with requirements under FISA, the application had to be first certified by the Director or Deputy Director of the FBI. It then required the approval of the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General (DAG), or the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division.

The FBI and DOJ obtained one initial FISA warrant targeting Carter Page and three FISA renewals from the FISC. As required by statute (50 U.S.C. §,1805(d)(l)), a FISA order on an American citizen must be renewed by the FISC every 90 days and each renewal requires a separate finding of probable cause. Then-Director James Comey signed three FISA applications in question on behalf of the FBI, and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe signed one. Then-DAG Sally Yates, then-Acting DAG Dana Boente, and DAG Rod Rosenstein each signed one or more FISA applications on behalf of DOJ.

Due to the sensitive nature of foreign intelligence activity, FISA submissions (including renewals) before the FISC are classified. As such, the public’s confidence in the integrity of the FISA process depends on the court’s ability to hold the government to the highest standard—particularly as it relates to surveillance of American citizens. However, the FISC’s rigor in protecting the rights of Americans, which is reinforced by 90-day renewals of surveillance orders, is necessarily dependent on the government’s production to the court of all material and relevant facts. This should include information potentially favorable to the target of the FISA application that is known by the government. In the case of Carter Page, the government had at least four independent opportunities before the FISC to accurately provide an accounting of the relevant facts. However, our findings indicate that, as described below, material and relevant information was omitted.

1) The “dossier” compiled by Christopher Steele (Steele dossier) on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application. Steele was a longtime FBI source who was paid over $160,000 by the DNC and Clinton campaign, via the law firm Perkins Coie and research firm Fusion GPS, to obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.

1. a) Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials.
2. b) The initial FISA application notes Steele was working for a named U.S. person, but does not name Fusion GPS and principal Glenn Simpson, who was paid by a U.S. law firm (Perkins Coie) representing the DNC (even though it was known by DOJ at the time that political actors were involved with the Steele dossier). The application does not mention Steele was ultimately working on behalf of—and paid by—the DNC and Clinton campaign, or that the FBI had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information.

2) The Carter Page FISA application also cited extensively a September 23, 2016, Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, which focuses on Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow. This article does not corroborate the Steele dossier because it is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News. The Page FISA application incorrectly assesses that Steele did not directly provide information to Yahoo News. Steele has admitted in British court filings that he met with Yahoo News—and several other outlets—in September 2016 at the direction of Fusion GPS. Perkins Coie was aware of Steele’s initial media contacts because they hosted at least one meeting in Washington D.C. in 2016 with Steele and Fusion GPS where this matter was discussed.

1. a) Steele was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations—an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI in an October 30, 2016, Mother Jones article by David Corn. Steele should have been terminated for his previous undisclosed contacts with Yahoo and other outlets in September—before the Page application was submitted to the FISC in October—but Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI about those contacts.
2. b) Steele’s numerous encounters with the media violated the cardinal rule of source handling—maintaining confidentiality—and demonstrated that Steele had become a less than reliable source for the FBI.

3) Before and after Steele was terminated as a source, he maintained contact with DOJ via then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, a senior DOJ official who worked closely with Deputy Attorneys General Yates and later Rosenstein. Shortly after the election, the FBI began interviewing Ohr, documenting his communications with Steele. For example, in September 2016, Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” This clear evidence of Steele’s bias was recorded by Ohr at the time and subsequently in official FBI files—but not reflected in any of the Page FISA applications.

1. a) During this same time period, Ohr’s wife was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research, paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS. The Ohrs’ relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS was inexplicably concealed from the FISC.

4) According to the head of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, Assistant Director Bill Priestap, corroboration of the Steele dossier was in its “infancy” at the time of the initial Page FISA application. After Steele was terminated, a source validation report conducted by an independent unit within FBI assessed Steele’s reporting as only minimally corroborated. Yet, in early January 2017, Director Comey briefed President-elect Trump on a summary of the Steele dossier, even though it was—according to his June 2017 testimony—“salacious and unverified.” While the FISA application relied on Steele’s past record of credible reporting on other unrelated matters, it ignored or concealed his anti-Trump financial and ideological motivations. Furthermore, Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.

5) The Page FISA application also mentions information regarding fellow Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos, but there is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos. The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok. Strzok was reassigned by the Special Counsel’s Office to FBI Human Resources for improper text messages with his mistress, FBI Attorney Lisa Page (no known relation to Carter Page), where they both demonstrated a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton, whom Strzok had also investigated. The Strzok/Lisa Page texts also reflect extensive discussions about the investigation, orchestrating leaks to the media, and include a meeting with Deputy Director McCabe to discuss an “insurance” policy against President Trump’s election.

The investigation into the alleged ties to Russia of presidential candidate Donald Trump by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, is itself the poisoned fruit of the poisoned tree, and anything it finds is also poisoned. So will it be called off?

Are the FISA court judges to be held to account for accepting a fraudulent case for the surveillance of a US citizen?

Is there a constitutional crisis as a result of this dirty conspiracy entered into by top law-enforcement agents?

Republicans in Congress are fed up with being played for irrelevant fools by the little dictators of the DOJ and FBI.

The stench of corruption from both those federal agencies grows stronger by the day.

The guilty men and women need to be cleaned out, and all the facts of their perfidy revealed.

Is it beginning to happen at last?

If the Clintons and their multitudinous gang in the “deep state”  are guilty of the dark crimes it seems they are, what would be the just punishment for them?

There is no precedent in American history for such crimes; none for so wide and deep and conscienceless a conspiracy to undermine the constitutional processes of the Republic.

They amount to treason, but not treason as defined by US law. (Article III of the Constitution defines treason as levying war against the United States, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid or comfort.) For clear cases of treason, even if they do not come within the legal definition of the crime, capital punishment alone may be  the right retribution. The Rosenbergs, who gave US nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, were found guilty of committing espionage, and were electrocuted to death. For the deep corruption of the intelligence services of the United States – for that alone – such a punishment would not be too extreme.

Failing the death penalty, how long would prison sentences have to be? How many “life” terms, served sequentially?

Or will they all get away completely with their crimes, every last one of the guilty men and women?

If they do, what will the rule of law mean in the USA? Nothing. Because it will have turned out that some people are above the law.

John Hinderaker writes at PowerLine:

It may be that Russians penetrated the DNC/Podesta email accounts, but the reports don’t prove that fact. More important, they contain nothing beyond bare assertion to support the implausible claim that Putin wanted Trump, rather than Hillary “Reset Button” Clinton, to win the election. Washington insiders say that the intelligence agencies have provided some evidence that Russia was behind the spearfishing of both the DNC and RNC accounts, but no evidence that Russia’s goal was to try to secure the election for Trump. On the contrary, there is little doubt that Russia’s agents in the U.S., relying on the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc., were reporting that Clinton had the election in the bag.

The FBI/CIA/NSA reports supplied an important link in the Democrats’ anti-Trump strategy. They implied that Trump’s alleged collusion with the Putin regime bore fruit: the Russians wanted Trump to win, they “meddled” in the election to achieve that purpose, and sure enough, he won the election. The intelligence community’s reports went a long way toward delegitimizing the Trump administration before it even came into being.

It now appears clear that this entire story was a fraud. There was no collusion; not by Trump, anyway. The collusion was all on the other side, and it looks to me as though the CIA’s and NSA’s politicized leaders were part of it. Who was the Director of the CIA when these reports were prepared and handed to the press? John Brennan …

Who was the Director of National Intelligence? The clueless and virulently anti-Trump James Clapper, who just a few days ago called President Trump an “asset” of Russia …

You could say these people are crazy, but a few short months ago they were in charge of the U.S. intelligence community. It seems clear that by the end of 2016 they were collaborating in the DNC/Clinton campaign/Steele/Fusion GPS/FBI/Russia effort to undermine the incoming Trump administration. An obvious question is, how far back did cooperation by CIA and NSA go? Did those agencies corruptly collaborate with Obama’s DOJ in spying on Trump and his associates during the campaign?

Based on what we already know, the DNC/Clinton campaign/Steele/Fusion GPS/Russia/FBI collusion looks like the biggest scandal in American political history. To the extent that the CIA and NSA were also involved, it can only get worse.

The man who, at least as much as anyone else in the Obama-corrupted Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), worked to undermine the duly elected President of the United States with a tissue of lies connected to each other with brilliant cunning and prodigious labor, was Peter Strzok, Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI and second in command of Counterintelligence. (For some of the things he did to help the plot to stitch up Donald Trump, see our post of two days ago: One Strzok after another – “as wrong as it gets”, December 11, 2017.) 

Yet he lays claim to high moral principles.

He wrote of Donald Trump that he “appears to have no ability to experience reverence which I [missing word here – let’s read “consider”] the foundation for any capacity to admire or serve anything bigger than self to want to learn about anything beyond self, to want to know and deeply honor the people around you.”

Let’s “deconstruct” this (to borrow a word for the nonce from the Evil Left).

Peter Strzok thinks a man should “have the ability” to “experience reverence” … He does not say “should revere”, but should ”experience reverence” as something that comes upon him. This reverence is “the foundation for a capacity to admire”. It is not in itself enough to bring one to admire; it is the foundation for a capacity to do it.

And what is it that should be admired? “Anything bigger than self” and “beyond self”. It is a thing worthy of being “served” as well as admired. One should ”want to learn about” it.

And it’s identity is finally revealed. What one should “want to know” and “deeply honor” is – are – “the people around you”.

To cut a long-winded piece of sanctimonious virtue-signaling short, Peter Strzok believes one should want to know and deeply honor the people around him. And – he believes –  Donald Trump does not have the ability to do this, because he cannot experience the reverence which is the foundation of the capacity to do it, it being something bigger than himself, so he does not want to know the people around him and does not honor the people around him.

So he does not deserve to be president.

Before we come on to the person Peter Strzok thinks does deserve to be president – someone who, presumably in his view, has the ability … the capacity … to want to know and deeply honor the people around her (yes, it’s her), let’s look harder at Peter Strzok.

He wrote that example of his high moral ideals to his mistress, Lisa Page, who was working for Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of the FBI and Acting Director from May 9, 2017 until August 2, 2017.

Peter Strzok and Lisa Page exchanged thousands of emails.

Page wrote of Donald Trump: “What an utter idiot.” And “God trump is a loathsome human. … omg he’s an idiot.” “He’s awful,” Strzok agreed.

Both of them are married. We do not regard adultery as a “sin”, but we recognize that many Americans do. And certainly neither of them was deeply honoring his and her spouse.

Lisa Page’s husband is Joseph Burrow ,“a non-profit executive” of  “an international  education organization”. His self-authored profile at LinkedIn tell us that he is Vice President for Student Engagement, International Student Exchange Programs (ISEP). Also that he is an “Experienced International Education Executive, Advocate for Flattening the Higher Education Hierarchy through User-Focused Design and Technology, Student Champion. Oversee Student Engagement and Marketing for 360+ Higher Education Institutions.” And, he says: “I also really like natural wine, good food, opera and taking time to eat on the street when traveling.” (The words in bold words do suggest, though it is no surprise, that he is a person of the Left.)

Peter Strzok’s wife is Melissa Hodgman, Associate Director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), appointed by Obama in late 2016. (And she wouldn’t have been appointed by Obama if she were not a person of the Left.)

The emails exchanged between the lovers yield much information about the plot laid against the man whom tens of millions of Americans chose to be their president. That much has emerged from some of the emails, and there are thousands more whose contents we have yet to hear about.

What else has been revealed is that both of them respected, admired, and actively supported Hillary Clinton when she was the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.

“God Hillary should win 100,000,000 – 0,” Strzok wrote in March 2016.

To abhor and despise a man who arouses enormous enthusiasm among tens of millions of people, on the grounds that he doesn’t want to know or honor them; and at the same time to revere, admire and actively support – by profoundly crooked means – a woman who called those people “deplorables” and is herself coldly immoral, unrepentantly corrupt, and even positively criminal, does not demonstrate an ability to judge character. 

Nor does Peter Strzok seem to have insight into his own character. Not an uncommon failing of us human beings. But for those who enjoy membership of the vast left-wing hypocrisy, a positive asset.

Condoning and aiding crime. Committing a form of treason. Then admitting it. A swamp creature losing his mind?

From Infowars

An ex-spy chief who spoke out publicly against Trump while inspiring other career intelligence figures to follow suit has admitted his leading role in the intelligence community waging political war against the president, describing his actions as something he didn’t “fully think through”.

In a surprisingly frank interview, the CIA’s Michael Morell – who was longtime Deputy Director and former Acting Director of the nation’s most powerful intelligence agency – said that it wasn’t a great idea to leak against and bash a new president.

Morell had the dubious distinction of being George W. Bush’s personal daily briefer for the agency before and after 9/11, and also served under Obama until his retirement. In the summer of 2016 he took the unusual step (for a former intelligence chief) of openly endorsing Hillary Clinton in a New York Times op-ed entitled, I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton, after which he continued to be both an outspoken critic of Trump and an early CIA voice promoting the Russian collusion and election meddling narrative.

As Politico’s Susan Glasser put in a newly published interview, Morell “has emerged out of the shadows of the deep state” to become one of Trump’s foremost critics speaking within the intel community. …

Morell acknowledges that he and other spy-world critics of the president failed to fully “think through” the negative backlash generated by their going political. “There was a significant downside,” Morell said in the interview.

Not only had Morell during his previous NYT op-ed stated that he was committed to doing “everything I can to ensure that she is elected as our 45th president” but he went so far as to call then candidate Trump “a threat to our national security” – while making the extraordinary claim that “in the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation”.

Curiously, Morell in his latest Politico interview indicates when asked about his “public profile” and activism so soon after leaving the agency (something that was relatively unusual prior to Trump taking office) that his post-retirement media appearances have been approved and/or received some level of oversight by the CIA. In the interview Morell states, “I did a 60 Minutes interview about my life inside CIA, and it’s something the agency thought that was a good thing to do, and I taped most of it before I left the agency.”

While such CIA review of former employees’ publications and media interaction is nothing new, in Morell’s case was an unprecedented example of a very high profile intelligence figure explicitly campaigning for a presidential candidate and against another while specifically invoking his role at the CIA (he began his NYT column with, “During a 33-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, I served presidents of both parties — three Republicans and three Democrats…” followed by a litany of key national security events he was central to).

The other important confirmation to come out of the discussion is the clear guiding assumption of the interview – that the intelligence “deep state” did in fact go to war with Trump – which has now been confirmed by Morell himself, which is essentially to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. …

Morrell said:

[Donald Trump is elected] president, and he’s supposed to be getting a daily brief from the moment he becomes the president-elect. Right? And he doesn’t. And within a few days, there’s leaks about how he’s not taking his briefing. So, he must have thought — right? — that, “Who are these guys? Are these guys out to get me? Is this a political organization? Can I think about them as a political organization when I become president?

So, I think there was a significant downside to those of us who became political in that moment. So, if I could have thought of that, would I have ended up in a different place? I don’t know. But it’s something I didn’t think about. …

For every other part of the intelligence community except CIA, you’re working for a cabinet member. At CIA, you are working for the president of the United States. That is your customer. Right? 00:08:03 So, when you see your customer questioning what it is that you are providing to him or her, and that person seems to be cherry-picking what they accept and what they don’t accept, it’s demoralizing. …

Yet Morell … admitted that he is personally one of the chief authors of precisely this “demoralizing” scenario in which the president doesn’t fully trust his intelligence briefers. …

We should all remember that this is a man who on the one hand described “Russia’s hacking is the political equivalent of 9/11” and constantly hyped “Russian propaganda”, while on the other he went on a lengthy RT [Russia Today] News segment in order to promote his newly published book.

Why were such men made heads of important government agencies? Other Intelligence chiefs, James Clapper, James Comey, and John Brennan have also revealed themselves to be dishonest and disloyal.

Examples of their deceptions:-

On Clapper, from Breitbart:

When James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, was asked under oath at a Senate Intelligence Committee meeting in March of this year: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?, he answered “No, sir.”  … Yet documents recently leaked by former NSA analyst and America’s number one fugitive, Edward Snowden, demonstrate Clapper likely gave false testimony to Congress. Clapper has since admitted he testified in the “least untruthful manner” he could think of and he was “too cute by half”. But there is little chance he will be prosecuted.

On Comey, from the Washington Times:

President Trump accused former FBI Director James B. Comey of lying to protect Hillary Clinton in a series of tweets on Wednesday after the agency released new documents on the investigation. … [He was]  commenting on an FBI document release on Monday that showed Mr. Comey began drafting a letter exonerating Mrs. Clinton prior to the conclusion of the investigation, and before even speaking to her about the matter. “As it has turned out, James Comey lied and leaked and totally protected Hillary Clinton. He was the best thing that ever happened to her!” the president tweeted.

On John Brennan, from Gateway Pundit:

Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump’s candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people. … A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as “non-partisan”.

The presidents who appointed these men are as much to blame as the perfidious operators themselves.

Those we trusted with the power to enforce the law and defend our liberty, let us down.

In America we have President Trump to restore moral decency to government – as well as restoring the economy and the standing of the United States in the world, after the massive damage that Barack Obama did to the country he led and despised.

But in the rest of the so-called free world, most of the political leaders in power are continuing the betrayal. How long will it take for the peoples of the West to get rid of their rotten rulers and find others with the courage and resolve to restore their heritage, their national identity and law-protected liberty?