President Trump has beautifully, elegantly, brilliantly finessed his enemies.

By taking the New York Times at its word that his communications were intercepted last year, Trump has forced the NYT either to take responsibility for exposing Obama’s scandalous activity, or to say that it was lying.

According to Andrew McCarthy (see our post immediately below, Now, President Trump, hit back), the Obama administration sought and eventually obtained FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) authorization to conduct the wire-tapping.

For what purposes can such FISA authorization be obtained?  And by whom?

From Wikipedia:

The President may authorize, through the Attorney General, electronic surveillance without a court order for the period of one year, provided that it is only to acquire foreign intelligence information, that it is solely directed at communications or property controlled exclusively by foreign powers, that there is no substantial likelihood that it will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party, and that it be conducted only in accordance with defined minimization procedures.

The code defines “foreign intelligence information” to mean information necessary to protect the United States against actual or potential grave attack, sabotage or international terrorism.

“Foreign powers” means a foreign government, any faction of a foreign nation not substantially composed of U.S. persons, and any entity directed or controlled by a foreign government. The definition also includes groups engaged in international terrorism and foreign political organizations. The sections of FISA authorizing electronic surveillance and physical searches without a court order specifically exclude their application to groups engaged in international terrorism.

A “U.S. person” includes citizens, lawfully admitted permanent resident aliens, and corporations incorporated in the United States.

“Minimization procedures” is defined to mean procedures that minimize the acquisition of information concerning United States persons, allow the retention of information that is evidence of a crime, and require a court order be obtained in order to retain communication involving a United States person for longer than 72 hours.

The Attorney General is required to make a certification of these conditions under seal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and report on their compliance to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Under the FISA act, anyone who engages in electronic surveillance except as authorized by statute is subject to both criminal penalties and civil liabilities.

So if the New York Times was correct, President Obama’s Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, authorized electronic surveillance of communication devices in Donald Trump’s offices, on the grounds that her Department of Justice had provable grounds for suspicion that Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for the presidency, was one side of a conspiracy to mount “grave attack, sabotage, or international terrorism” against the United States – even though there was “substantial likelihood” that by doing so she would “acquire the contents of … communication(s) to which a United States person” – Donald Trump personally or an associate of his – was a party”.

If that’s what she did, she broke the law.

If she gathered any information from FISA-authorized wire-tapping,  and retained it for more than an allowed 72 hours, or disseminated it to persons who illegally leaked it to the media, she broke the law.

If any of this happened, then there was a deep-laid plot by the Obama administration to destroy Donald Trump’s reputation and wreck his presidency should he be elected.

But then again, maybe the wire-tapping never happened, in which case the New York Times was lying – not at all an implausible probability.

Matthew Vadum writes at Front Page:

President Donald Trump caused a media firestorm by claiming over the weekend that then-President Obama wire-tapped telephones at Trump Tower in Manhattan during the final leg of last year’s election campaign.

Seeing the writing on the wall, tainted FBI Director James Comey promptly and publicly urged the Department of Justice to reject Trump’s claims. Although it is an attempt at a cover-up, it is an admirably transparent one.

Now the outlines of a Watergate-like conspiracy are emerging in which a sitting Democrat president apparently used the apparatus of the state to spy on a Republican presidential candidate. Watergate differed in that President Nixon didn’t get involved in the plot against the Democratic National Committee until later as an accomplice after the fact. Here Obama likely masterminded, or oversaw someone like the diabolical Benghazi cover-up artist Ben Rhodes, masterminding the whole thing.

Throughout his agonizingly long presidency, Obama serially abused his powers as the nation’s Chief Executive to undermine his political opponents. It might be said that every day of his presidency he committed at least one impeachable offense.

Obama used the IRS to target conservative and Tea Party nonprofits, along with Catholic, Jewish, and pro-Israel organizations. He brazenly lied about it, too. His Justice Department surreptitiously obtained telephone records for more than 100 reporters. … Books have been written about his corruption and many more such volumes will follow. …

A spokesman for Obama, who now lives in former Bill Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart’s walled mansion with Valerie Jarrett on Washington’s Embassy Row so he can pursue his unprecedented, taxpayer-subsidized post-presidential war against Trump, denied Obama ordered that Trump Tower be wiretapped.

“A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice,” according to a carefully-worded statement. “As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

Of course, as others quickly pointed out, the denial is misdirection.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy wrote yesterday that the denial “seems disingenuous on several levels”. When a warrant is obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), “it is technically the FISA court that ‘orders’ surveillance”. Moreover, under the law, “it is the Justice Department, not the White House, that represents the government in proceedings before the FISA court”. 

McCarthy wrote presciently on Jan. 11: “The idea that FISA could be used against political enemies always seemed far-fetched. Now it might not be.”

Besides, Obama and his gang have generally been smart enough to hide their tracks when carrying out political dirty tricks. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, and NSA, aren’t headquartered in the White House. Obama could wage war against Trump by creating multiple layers of plausible deniability. That’s what a community organizer from Chicago does.

Predictably, former Obama speechwriter [Ben] Rhodes went on Twitter to lie. Replying to a Trump tweet, the Iranian mullahs’ best friend wrote, cheekily, that, “No President can order a wiretap. Those restrictions were put in place to protect citizens from people like you.” …

Most mainstream journalists were loath over the past eight years to call the exhaustively documented and at times bald-faced lies and misdeeds of President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and HHS Secretary Sebelius. It would seem uncovering government corruption is only a journalist’s duty when a Republican resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. …

Let’s recount what former British Member of Parliament Louise Mensch reported at Heat Street on Nov. 7, the day before the U.S. election.

Two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community have confirmed to Heat Street that the FBI sought, and was granted, a FISA court warrant in October, giving counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia.

Contrary to earlier reporting in the New York Times, which cited FBI sources as saying that the agency did not believe that the private server in Donald Trump’s Trump Tower which was connected to a Russian bank had any nefarious purpose, the FBI’s counter-intelligence arm, sources say, re-drew an earlier FISA court request around possible financial and banking offenses related to the server. The first request, which, sources say, named Trump, was denied back in June, but the second was drawn more narrowly and was granted in October after evidence was presented of a server, possibly related to the Trump campaign, and its alleged links to two banks; SVB Bank and Russia’s Alfa Bank. While the Times story speaks of metadata, sources suggest that a FISA warrant was granted to look at the full content of emails and other related documents that may concern US persons.

The FBI agents who talked to the New York Times, and rubbished the ground-breaking stories of Slate (Franklin Foer) and Mother Jones (David Corn) may not have known about the FISA warrant, sources say, because the counter-intelligence and criminal sides of the FBI often work independently of each other employing the principle of ‘compartmentalization’.

… We already knew that days before Trump’s inauguration, it was reported that Obama green-lighted a disturbing relaxation of the rules regulating the National Security Agency’s ability to circulate globally intercepted personal communications among the other 16 intelligence agencies, some of which are more politicized than the NSA, before applying important longstanding privacy-protection protocols. Before the policy was altered, the NSA [had] screened out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information before passing intercepted communications along to other agencies like the CIA or the FBI’s intelligence units.

Put another way, 17 days before President Trump was sworn in, NSA was unleashed against his embryonic administration, newly empowered to share raw intelligence gathered from telephone calls and emails that go through network switches outside the country, as well as messages between people outside the U.S. that go through domestic network switches.

WikiLeaks offered a refresher course in Obama’s treachery on Twitter Sunday, noting that “Obama has a history of tapping & hacking his friends and rivals”, and providing plenty of examples. …

And despite the growing mass media hysteria, there is still no publicly available evidence the Trump campaign somehow colluded with the Russian government last year. Sources in newspaper articles are never identified.

There is not a scintilla of proof of improper conduct.

All we have is the alleged say-so of faceless CIA spooks whose motives are questionable, to put it charitably.

Tom Shattuck writes at the Boston Herald:

In what has already been a historically bad year for Democrats, it just may be that they’re about to lose again to Donald Trump, this time in a high-stakes game of Russian roulette.

The Dems’ Putin smear was supposed to paint President Trump as a friend of the tyrant and beneficiary of Russian meddling in the election. Instead, it is the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party, former President Barack Obama, who may take the fall.

Snooping on a presidential candidate is serious business.

The Democrats want you to think this is a crazy conspiracy theory for an unhinged tweeting president.

But Obama has a rich legacy of using the federal government as a political weapon and it would be foolish to think he suddenly started restraining himself, when he was never held to account by either the media or Democrats in power.

Remember, Obama’s Justice Department secretly subpoenaed the private phone records of Associated Press editors and reporters. It was pure spying.

Fox News reporter James Rosen and his family were wiretapped.

Former CBS news reporter Sharyl Attkisson’s computer was hacked by the government.

Add to these incidents the harassment of conservative organizations by Obama’s IRS, and the mercenary nature of the Obama administration reveals itself.

We’re told Obama administration officials went to the FISA Court twice last year for warrants to conduct electronic surveillance on candidate Trump. Why?

The DNC leaks show that DNC staffers were formulating “Russia” attacks on Trump as far back as last April, with one email between two committee members reading “the pro-Russia stuff ties in pretty well to idea that Trump is too friendly with Putin/weak on Russia”.

Then there is the infamous “dossier” — anonymous reports that Trump campaign members were speaking to Russian officials with some frequency last year and the existence of wiretapped audio. …

The left wants to play the Russia game and President Trump should oblige.

There should be an immediate investigation, and we’ll see where the espionage trail leads. 

President Trump has requested the congressional intelligence committees “to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016”.

Barack Obama and Loretta Lynch would be foolish not to be afraid.

What disservice have these four men done to the Intelligence Services of the United States – which they have been in charge of under Obama, the Disserver-in-Chief?:

James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, who informed Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood was “largely secular”.

Mike Morell, former Director of the CIA, who helped concoct White House lies to cover-up the horrific treachery that was “Benghazigate”.

John Brennan, Director of the CIA, who defends Islam in this age of a renewed Islamic onslaught on the West. 

James Comey, Director of the FBI, who protected Hillary Clinton from prosecution for her many serious crimes.

Have they turned the Intelligence Services into the enemies of the new United States administration? A Democratic Senator and a journalist who “held positions as the Germany bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and Germany correspondent for Time magazine” and is now with the Brookings Institution, claim that that is what has happened.

Cliff Kincaid writes at Canada Free Press:

Echoing New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s warning that the intelligence community is out to “get” President-elect Trump, a Brookings Institution expert who served in the Clinton administration says that Trump’s treatment of his spies will “come back to bite him” in the form of “devastating” leaks to the media that will make him look foolish or incompetent.

“Leaking by intelligence officials and analysts is, of course, illegal. The intelligence community doesn’t leak as much as the Pentagon or Congress, but when its reputation is at stake, it can do so to devastating effect,” says Daniel Benjamin of the Brookings Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence. Benjamin previously served as the principal advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on counterterrorism and was embroiled in the controversy over Mrs. Clinton’s failure to stop the massacre of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

The Bookings Institution is generously funded by Arab governments.

Benjamin’s article, How Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community will come back to haunt him, did not refute the widely held belief that President Obama’s CIA and its director John Brennan were behind the recent leaks to The Washington Post and New York Times depicting Trump as a Russian puppet. In fact, the implication is that the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community will seek further revenge on Trump if he continues to criticize them.

At his recent news conference, in regard to the leaks about his meetings with intelligence officials, Trump noted that “I think it’s pretty sad when intelligence reports get leaked out to the press. I think it’s pretty sad. First of all, it’s illegal. You know, these are classified and certified meetings and reports.”

But it appears that some intelligence officials believe they are above the law and can use illegal leaks to damage an elected President who has been critical of their work product. In the most recent case, CNN and BuzzFeed were leaked a document offering unsubstantiated claims of Trump being sexually compromised by Russian officials. CNN summarized the document; BuzzFeed published the whole thing.

Trump denounced these leaks, with Director of the Office of National Intelligence James Clapper disclosing that he had called Trump about them and had declared his “profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press …”. He said that he and Trump “both agreed that they are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security”.

Trump said Clapper “called me yesterday to denounce the false and fictitious report that was illegally circulated.”

“I do not believe the leaks came from within the IC [Intelligence Community],” Clapper said. However, he did not indicate what investigation, if any, he had conducted to make this determination.

“When something goes wrong — say a military deployment to combat jihadi insurgents in the Middle East blows up in the Trump administration’s face — the press will overflow with stories telling of intelligence reports that were ignored by the White House and briefings the president missed,” Benjamin wrote. Such stories, of course, would be based on illegal leaks.

“Imagine what an aggrieved intel community might do to a genuinely hostile president,” he said. Benjamin’s comments suggest that the intelligence community will use the media to blame Trump for things that go wrong in foreign affairs, in order to protect its own reputation. …

It’s reputation? It’s reputation now, thanks to its own leaders, needs improving, not protecting.

The Brookings expert said, “The CIA is usually one of the very first agencies to establish a relationship with new chief executives, because of the briefings it delivers before elections have even occurred and the beguiling prospect it offers of handling missions quietly and efficiently.”

It’s not clear what he means by this. The Obama CIA’s “covert” arms-running program in Syria has backfired in a big way, provoking a Russian military intervention, the loss of up to 500,000 lives, and a refugee crisis which threatens the future of Europe.

Benjamin speculated that Trump will ask the CIA to organize a covert operation to undermine the regime in Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism, and that the agency will offer him options that don’t guarantee success and which he may have to reject. He wrote that “…it is an iron law of bureaucracy that no agency will knock itself out for a leader it deems capricious, especially one who cannot be relied on to defend his own if something goes wrong.”

“The answer from the intel community will never be no,” he said. “Instead, the planners will brief the president on three different approaches. Then they will assess the risk of failure for each at 60-80 percent, providing the Oval Office with a dare it cannot possibly accept. For some, of course, this could turn out to be a silver lining in an otherwise dismal story.”

In short, the CIA will look for excuses not to proceed, and then get back to the business of leaking damaging stories to the press when terrorist incidents and other problems occur.

Is the CIA really the “invisible government” that the so-called “conspiracy theorists” have warned about? Is there a “deep state” that tries to run the government behind-the-scenes? 

Here is the video clip – we view it gain and again for the sheer pleasure of it – in which President-elect Trump treats journalists who try to traduce him with the powerful scorn they deserve:

Hillary Clinton is blaming other people – never herself! – for losing the presidential election; chiefly James Comey for informing Congress that certain of her emails were still under investigation, and Barack Obama for not stopping Comey from doing it.

Sure. Had that letter to Congress not been issued, Hillary Clinton, corrupt as she is, traitorous as she is, lying as she does, proposing policies guaranteed to harm America and make all Americans poorer, would have been elected by a landslide. Definitely. No doubt about it.

See the smile gone from poor Hillary’s face. She is crying. Aaah! – you gotta feel sorry for her, right?

One person she cannot blame is George Soros. He spent hundreds of millions on dirty tricks he was certain would get her elected.

J. Christian Adams writes at PJMedia:

Leaked funding documents reveal an effort by George Soros and his foundations to manipulate election laws and process rules ahead of the federal election far more expansively than has been previously reported.

The billionaire and convicted felon moved hundreds of millions of dollars into often-secret efforts to change election laws, fuel litigation to attack election integrity measures, push public narratives about voter fraud, and to integrate the political ground game of the left with efforts to scare racial minority groups about voting rights threats.

These Soros-funded efforts moved through dozens of charities and involved the active compliance with civil rights groups, government officials, and purportedly non-partisan groups like the League of Women Voters.

The leaked documents also reveal deliberate and successful efforts to manipulate media coverage of election issues in mainstream media outlets like the The New York Times. Conservatives and Republicans have no opposing effort or source of funds that represents even a small fraction in opposition to level of the Soros-led manipulation contained in the leaked documents.

The documents reveal that the Soros campaign fueled litigation attacking election integrity measures, such as citizenship verification and voter ID. It funded long-term efforts to fundamentally transform election administration  … It propped up left-leaning media to attack reports of voter fraud, and conducted racially and ideologically targeted voter registration drives.

The racially targeted voter registration drives were executed at the same time Soros dollars were funding other public relations efforts to polarize racial minority groups by scaring them about the loss of voting rights and the dangers of police officers.

The Soros documents reveal hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into the effort to transform the legal and media environment touching on elections. One document … states: “George Soros has authorized U.S. Programs to propose a budget of $320 million over two years … ”

… Soros documents show that it funded efforts to attack the efforts of Tea Party organizations such as True the Vote to promote election integrity …

The funding documents name groups which received in excess of $500,000 each year from Soros. … Three of the largest recipients are engaged in litigation and strategic communications denying voter fraud and seeking to transform the rules of elections.

Soros money is moving away from pressing for “campaign finance reform” and speech regulations, and instead into election process areas.  …

Soros money fought voter ID everywhere.  The leaked documents state: “…  Not only was this field successful at blocking restrictive laws from being implemented in Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin and South Carolina, but a strong coalition in Minnesota came from behind to achieve the first victory against photo ID on the ballot.”

Soros money was directed at the Advancement Project and Brennan Center to influence media coverage on election integrity issues and provide voter fraud denial propaganda.  Leaked funding documents state: “In a specific grant update, the U.S. Programs board-funded communications and messaging project was successfully led by the Brennan Center and the Advancement Project, and played an important role in the spike in media attention on voting rights this year. The groups developed affirmative voting rights messages and shared them widely in and beyond the field. The messages were used verbatim hundreds of times in sources ranging from The New York Times to the Philadelphia Inquirer, quickly and fully working their way into the media, national and local, and across social networking sites.”  Verbatim. …

Soros money is funding some of the loudest voices who deny that voter fraud is a serious problem. These voices have produced poorly researched studies that are routinely cited by mainstream media to argue that voter fraud is a myth.  Among the groups are the Brennan Center for Justice and the Advancement Project, two organizations that have opposed election integrity laws and have sought to stop the efforts of states to ensure that only citizens are voting.  Soros grants also went to “New America Media,” which describes itself as “a nationwide association of 3,000 ethnic media organizations representing the development of a more inclusive journalism.”  This mix of funding for media efforts with non-profit organizations that oppose election integrity was branded as “Broad and Equitable Access to the Ballot” in Soros funding documents. …

Soros-funded groups even swoop in after ligation to push narratives to voters about the results of Soros-funded litigation. One leaked document shows $158,000 was spent on this activity in Texas alone …

Soros money specifically targeted voter mobilization efforts of racial minority groups that exhibit racially polarized voting patterns and can be counted on to support Democrats.  For example, the “Democracy and Power Fund” was established to “inspire the participation of people of color, immigrants, young people, and low income people  . . . . The fund invests in multi-issue advocacy, organizing and voter participation organizations that work at the federal, state and local level to expand access to democracy and build power for lasting social justice and systemic change.”  This distinct effort from all of the other Soros activities involved over $15,000,000 in just the three-year period from 2010-2012. …

Other documents reveal extensive funding streams to tilt process rules involving elections.  …  The “Democracy and Power Fund” funded efforts to “increase participation in the 2010 U.S. Census, a key effort to ensure that OSI communities of interest – immigrants, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, low-income people, and people of color – will not be undercounted. … ” The project’s messaging worked its way into national and local media. A complementary $200,000 grant to New America Media, a multi-media content producer and aggregator for ethnic media, extended this work to thousands of local ethnic media outlets. “The public opinion and communications efforts influenced registration and get out the vote efforts, ballot initiative outcomes, and this fall’s string of court victories for voting rights.” …

Prior to the 2012 election, Soros organizations also planned to move millions to a swarm of downstream groups to fund organizing and political activities.  …

Soros money is also behind the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Education Fund.  $300,000 in Soros money went to “mobilizing the Latino community to engage in civic life, and promoting policies that advance Latino civic engagement”; $500,000 went to the National Council of La Raza and Democracia USA to conduct “nonpartisan voter registration and voter education in latino communities”; $200,000 went to the Center for Civic Policy to engage “ordinary people in the policy debates that affect their daily lives through increasing voter turnout; educating and mobilizing the public on issues; and training new leaders for civic life.” …

Soros money is fueling the effort to reassert federal control over state elections by passing amendments to the Voting Rights Act. …

We have omitted much of the very long article. Read it all here, see how much this man spent on his personal plot to wreck the American democratic process and get the corrupt and criminal Hillary Clinton into the presidency.

All wasted, George. Aw, shucks!

Anyway. He hasn’t been deterred by his failure to get his pick into the presidency. He’s not giving up. Not he! He’s now paying thousands of thugs to march through cities all across America, assaulting Trump voters and police, throwing Molotov cocktails, starting fires, to protest the election of Donald Trump. Does he really believe that the protests will reverse the result?

As soon as there are new heads of the FBI and the Department of Justice appointed by President Trump to replace the present corrupt Obama appointees, George Soros will – surely? – be arrested and sent to prison for inciting riot and whatever else he deserves to be charged with.

Then we can feel ever so sorry for him too.

This day of President-elect Donald Trump’s triumph.

To add to the pleasure of the victory, consider how glum must they be feeling, all those princes, emirs, CEOs, diplomats, wheeler-dealers, unscrupulous exploiters of the downtrodden, financiers of mass murderers who gave money to the Clintons – ostensibly to their “charitable” Foundation – in the expectation that a future President Hillary Clinton would reward them with favors. Millions, tens of millions of dollars, down the drain! George Soros, the èminence mauvaise of the whole international Left, poured … what… billions ? into getting the corrupt Clintons back into supreme power. All wasted, George, all wasted now.

The Clinton Foundation will get no more donations. Not much point now in its continuing to exist. It never did give anything worth mentioning to charity. And what need now for Bill and Hillary and Chelsea to jet round the world and live high on the hog – the “good causes” on which the Foundation spent most of its bribe-money?

The Clintons will be out of public life at last. As a former president, Bill and his wife will continue to have Secret Service guards – to her continuing annoyance. The disadvantage of being Someone Important without being important.

Let’s think gleefully of the impending departure from high office of Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, Loretta Lynch, Jeh Johnson. Maybe James Comey too.

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR will no longer be welcome at the White House. Happiness!

And yet more happiness: Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, John Kerry – that bunch of irritating women who have surrounded Barack Obama –  will pass into dim obscurity, and their dirty deeds will have to be undone, now that the eight-year long winter of our discontent is changed to glorious summer by this Son of New York.

Last night the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich said to the FOX Business Network’s Lou Dobbs (by far the best of all TV hosts) –

We have never in American history had the depth of corruption that we are seeing, and frankly you’ll notice that John Podesta, the leader of the Clinton campaign was having dinners with Justice Department officials while they were investigating Hillary.

He said that the Clinton email scandal has tarnished the FBI’s reputation.

[James] Comey is the first corrupt director we’ve seen in the sense that clearly the stuff that he knows is a lie. I clearly assume he was pressured by the Attorney General, who had a secret meeting with Bill Clinton on an airplane the week they were going to investigate his wife.”

Gingrich predicts that Donald Trump will win the presidential election:

I believe in the end, Hillary loses. I don’t believe the American people are going to send someone to the White House who ought to be indicted and facing very severe penalties for what she has been doing.

Has the Director of the FBI, James Comey, been stung by the many and persistent accusations of his corruption?

He appears to be re-opening the case against Hillary Clinton.

The Washington Post reports today:

The FBI will investigate whether additional classified material is contained in emails sent using Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was secretary of state, FBI Director James Comey informed congressional leaders Friday.

The announcement appears to restart the FBI’s probe of Clinton’s server, less than two weeks before the presidential election, an explosive development that could shape the campaign’s final days.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Comey said that the FBI had, in connection with an “unrelated case”, recently “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the Clinton investigation”.

Comey indicated that he had been briefed on the new material yesterday. “I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation,” he wrote.

Any chance, we wonder, that Comey will recommend Hillary’s prosecution, and Loretta Lynch’s corrupt Department of Justice accept that recommendation, and all before election day?

Hmmm ….

Last Monday (October 17, 2016) Julian Assange’s Wikileaks released a tenth batch of John Podesta’s emails. He is the manager of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

We select from Truth Revolt’s selection of the main points they concern:

Major voter-fraud exposed as Clinton camp cites then-senator Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign in which he “flooded” the caucuses with “ineligible voters” thus securing his nomination in 2008. Colorado cited in particular. Implies Clinton camp to do the same.

And Obama is at present scoffing at the very idea that his Democratic Party would practice voter fraud in any shape or form!

After subpoena Podesta suggests withholding emails exchanged between Hillary Clinton and President Obama.“Think we should hold emails to and from potus?” Podesta asked in an email. “That’s the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. Three weeks later Camp Clinton used BleachBit to erase more than 33,000 emails, likely including those to and from POTUS discussed herein.

It seems they never even entertained the idea of obeying the law.

The Department of Justice colluded with the Clinton campaign on the email investigation likely in order to prepare her.

Clinton-attorney David Kendal admits legal team did not turn over important email thumb drive and server to State Department.

Collusion between the Hillary campaign and the media is routine.  

NY Times warns Hillary in advance of stories it is about to publish

Email seems to reveal ABC’s George Stephanopolous colluded with Clinton camp to discredit Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash.

Podesta says it’s great to be able to feed stories to the media who “Tee Up for Us” — cites NY Time’s Maggie Haberman.

Multiple emails reveal mainstream media collusion with the Clinton campaign including from the Washington Post and CNN, among other outlets. 

Clinton staffers discussed which of Hillary Clinton’s emails to release and which not to (i.e. delete).

Donna Brazile in fact had the exact wording of a proposed CNN town hall question and fed it to the Clinton campaign prior to the event. 

Trump is accused by the Hillary campaign of connections to Putin. Trump has no connections to Putin – but the Hillary campaign does:

Podesta owns 75,000 shares of Putin-backed company.

Details about Clinton’s involvement and cover-up in the Uranium One deal. During her time as Secretary of State, Clinton approved the sale of roughly 20% of our nation’s uranium production to a Russian-government backed company called Uranium One, which in turn donated millions to the Clinton Foundation. Clinton did not disclose these donations, covering them up instead.

They practice blatant lying to smear Trump:

Clinton camp planted fake sexist Trump jobs ads on Craigslist.

They despise blacks and Muslims:

African Americans and Muslims were disparaged as “losers”.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar — both big donors to the Clinton Foundation — are funding ISIS. 

Troubles within the campaign:

Campaign feared what, exactly, was in Clinton’s emails.

Clinton’s own campaign called her a “mediocre” and “lackluster” candidate.

Clinton campaign was concerned about Bill Clinton’s sex-life as a liability to the campaign. 

Campaign staff admitted that Clinton often lies and said she should not press Sanders for his medical records during the primaries, insinuating it would open a can of worms for her.

Their contempt for Bernie Sanders and his supporters was strong:

Hillary Campaign planned (and succeeded) to fool Bernie Sanders and his “self-righteous ideologue” supporters at the convention. Podesta and campaign staff planned to “throw [Sanders] a bone” at the convention by falsely vowing to curb the Superdelegate system. This was done to make Sanders and his “bitching” supporters “think they’ve won something.”

Hillary Clinton called Bernie Sanders supporters a “bucket of losers” in Goldman Sachs speech.

Eager researchers can dig into the email piles for themselves by starting at:

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/15616

(We have found the site difficult to access. Links don’t seem to work.)

The whole slimy Clinton mafia that has taken over the government, its agencies, the media and the country – and even exerts its will abroad, as it has shown by stopping Julian Assange’s internet access – needs to be brought down. Only the election of Trump can do it. 

The FBI has been corrupted by the Clintons.

Specifically, the FBI’s director, James Comey, has been corrupted by the Clintons.

It is good to learn that there are FBI agents who hate the corruption and are prepared to say so publicly. Unfortunately, they are all retired.

Paul Sperry writes at the New York Post:

Veteran FBI agents say FBI Director James Comey has permanently damaged the bureau’s reputation for uncompromising investigations with his “cowardly” whitewash of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information using an unauthorized private e-mail server.

Feeling the heat from congressional critics, Comey last week argued that the case was investigated by career FBI agents, “So if I blew it, they blew it, too.”

But agents say Comey tied investigators’ hands by agreeing to unheard-of ground rules and other demands by the lawyers for Clinton and her aides that limited their investigation. “In my 25 years with the bureau, I never had any ground rules in my interviews,” said retired agent Dennis V. Hughes, the first chief of the FBI’s computer-investigations unit.

Instead of going to prosecutors and insisting on using grand jury leverage to compel testimony and seize evidence, Comey allowed immunity for several key witnesses, including potential targets.

The immunity agreements came with outrageous side deals, including preventing agents from searching for any documents on a Dell laptop owned by former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills generated after Jan. 31, 2015, when she communicated with the server administrator who destroyed subpoenaed e-mails.

Comey also agreed to have Mills’ laptop destroyed after the restricted search, denying Congress the chance to look at it and making the FBI an accomplice to the destruction of evidence. Comey’s immunized witnesses nonetheless suffered chronic lapses in memory, made unsubstantiated claims of attorney-client privilege upon tougher questioning and at least two gave demonstrably false statements.

And yet Comey indulged it all. What’s more, Comey cut a deal to give Clinton a “voluntary” witness interview on a major holiday, and even let her ex-chief of staff sit in on the interview as a lawyer, even though she, too, was under investigation. Clinton’s interview, the culmination of a yearlong investigation, lasted just 3 ½ hours. Despite some 40 bouts of amnesia, she wasn’t called back for questioning; and three days later, Comey cleared her of criminal wrongdoing.

“The FBI has politicized itself, and its reputation will suffer for a long time,” Hughes said. “I hold director Comey responsible.”

Agreed retired FBI agent Michael M. Biasello: “Comey has singlehandedly ruined the reputation of the organization.” The accommodations afforded Clinton and her aides are “unprecedented,” Biasello added, “which is another way of saying this outcome was by design”. He called Comey’s decision not to seek charges “cowardly”.

“Each month for 27 years, I received oral and computer admonishments concerning the proper protocol for handling top secret and other classified material, and was informed of the harsh penalties, to include prosecution and incarceration” for mishandling such material, [Biasello] pointed out. “Had myself or my colleagues engaged in behavior of the magnitude of Hillary Clinton, as described by Comey, we would be serving time in Leavenworth.”

Former FBI official I.C. Smith knows a thing or two about Clinton corruption. After working at FBI headquarters as a section chief in the National Security Division, he retired as special agent in charge of the Little Rock, Ark., field office, where he investigated top Clinton fund-raisers for public corruption and even Chinese espionage. “FBI agents upset with Comey’s decision have every reason to feel that way,” Smith said. “Clearly there was a different standard applied to Clinton. I have no doubt resourceful prosecutors and FBI agents could have come up with some charge that she would have been subject to prosecution,” the 25-year veteran added. “What she did is absolutely abhorrent for anyone who has access to classified information.”

What’s needed is a revolt within the FBI. Resignations. Protests. Statements of fact and opinion to those few media who are not subjects of the Clinton imperium and will publish them.

But hope that that will happen is fading.

Ed Klein has just published a new book, Guilty as Sin, in which he describes how details of FBI Director James Comey’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s illegal personal email server were delivered to the Oval Office in a briefcase by Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The Conservative Tribune reports:

In an excerpt of Guilty As Sin, published on Newsmax, Klein says that Comey realized his investigation was being undermined when he saw White House press secretary Josh Earnest indicate during a news conference that the administration had details of the FBI’s investigation:

It was Jan. 29, 2016, and an aide had just handed Comey a printout of today’s White House press conference by Josh Earnest, the president’s spokesman. There, marked for Comey’s attention, was Earnest’s response to a reporter who had asked whether Hillary Clinton was likely to be indicted as a result of the FBI’s investigation into her personal emails.

“Based on what we know from the Department of Justice,” Earnest said, “it does not seem to be headed in that direction.”

Based on what we know!

“How does Earnest know anything?” Comey asked.

Enter Loretta Lynch, who acted as Hillary Clinton’s guardian angel.

Uniformed FBI agents on Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s protective detail had informed Comey that Lynch had locked an armful of documents on the FBI investigation into her briefcase and delivered them to the White House. More than once, Lynch had brought along a Justice Department prosecutor who was working on the Hillary case to brief the president’s staff. These briefings between Lynch and the White House (which Lynch publicly denied because they were unethical) had been going on since Comey’s investigation began in the summer of 2015. Comey was aware, of course, that his criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton was inevitably linked with the highest possible stakes in American politics. If his agents turned up evidence of criminal wrongdoing on Hillary’s part, it would ignite the greatest political firestorm since Watergate. And more likely than not, that would derail Hillary’s candidacy for the White House.”

… Klein’s book could [does – ed] indicate just how deep Obama was willing to go in order to ensure that Hillary Clinton stayed out of trouble.

This is why we can’t have four more years of Democrats making sure that laws aren’t enforced.

All the chief officials elected or appointed to enforce the law, breaking it!

Among the many bad things that Hillary Clinton has accomplished (and she has accomplished only bad things), one of the very worst is her destruction of the rule of law in America.

She could only do this with the co-operation of the Department of Justice; and the Department of Justice could only do it with the co-operation of the FBI.

Two of the chief pillars of justice, two of the the mightiest guarantors of the rule of law, have both been suborned by this woman.

Judge Andrew Napolitano writes at Townhall:

Earlier this week, Republican leaders in both houses of Congress took the FBI to task for its failure to be transparent. In the House, it was apparently necessary to serve a subpoena on an FBI agent to obtain what members of Congress want to see; and in the Senate, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee accused the FBI itself of lawbreaking.

Here is the back story.

Ever since FBI Director James Comey announced on July 5 he was recommending that the Department of Justice not seek charges against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a result of her failure to safeguard state secrets during her time in office, many in Congress have had a nagging feeling that this was a political, not a legal, decision.

The publicly known evidence of Clinton’s recklessness and willful failure to safeguard secrets was overwhelming. The evidence of her lying under oath about whether she returned all her work-related emails that she had taken from the State Department was profound and incontrovertible.

And then we learned that people who worked for Clinton were instructed to destroy several of her mobile devices and to remove permanently the stored emails on one of her servers. All this was done after these items had been subpoenaed by two committees of the House of Representatives. Yet the FBI – which knew of the post-subpoena destruction of evidence and which acknowledged that Clinton failed to return thousands of her work-related emails as she had been ordered by a federal judge to do, notwithstanding at least three of her assertions to the contrary while under oath – chose to overlook the evidence of not only espionage but also obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence, perjury and misleading Congress.

As if to defend itself in the face of this most un-FBI-like behavior, the FBI then released to the public selected portions of its work product, which purported to back up its decision to recommend against the prosecution of Clinton.

Normally, the FBI gathers evidence and works with federal prosecutors and federal grand juries to build cases against targets in criminal probes, and its recommendations to prosecutors are confidential.

But in Clinton’s case, the hierarchy of the Department of Justice removed itself from the chain of command because of the orchestrated impropriety of Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton, who met in private on the attorney general’s plane at a time when both Bill and Hillary Clinton were subjects of FBI criminal investigations.

That left the FBI to have the final say about prosecution – or so the FBI and the DOJ would have us all believe.

It is hard to believe that the FBI was free to do its work, and it is probably true that the FBI was restrained by the White House early on. There were numerous aberrations in the investigation. There was no grand jury; no subpoenas were issued; no search warrants were served. Two people claimed to have received immunity, yet the statutory prerequisite for immunity – giving testimony before a grand or trial jury – was never present. 

Because many members of Congress do not believe that the FBI acted free of political interference, they demanded to see the full FBI files in the case, not just the selected portions of the files that the FBI had released. In the case of the House, the FBI declined to surrender its files, and the agent it sent to testify about them declined to reveal their contents. This led to a dramatic service of a subpoena by the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on that FBI agent while he was testifying – all captured on live nationally broadcast television.

Now the FBI, which usually serves subpoenas and executes search warrants, is left with the alternative of complying with this unwanted subpoena by producing its entire file or arguing to a federal judge why it should not be compelled to do so.

On the Senate side, matters are even more out of hand. There, in response to a request from the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI sent both classified and unclassified materials to the Senate safe room. The Senate safe room is a secure location that is available only to senators and their senior staff, all of whom must surrender their mobile devices and writing materials and swear in writing not to reveal whatever they see while in the room before they are permitted to enter. According to Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI violated federal law by commingling classified and unclassified materials in the safe room, thereby making it unlawful for senators to discuss publicly the unclassified material.

Imposing such a burden of silence on U.S. senators about unclassified materials is unlawful and unconstitutional. What does the FBI have to hide? Whence comes the authority of the FBI to bar senators from commenting on unclassified materials?

Who cares about this? Everyone who believes that the government works for us should care because we have a right to know what the government – here the FBI – has done in our names. Sen. Grassley has opined that if he could reveal what he has seen in the FBI unclassified records, it would be of profound interest to American voters.

What is going on here? The FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton has not served the rule of law. The rule of law – a pillar of American constitutional freedom since the end of the Civil War – mandates that the laws are to be enforced equally. No one is beneath their protection, and no one is above their requirements. To enforce the rule of law, we have hired the FBI.

What do we do when the FBI rejects its basic responsibilities? 

The Roman satirist Juvenal asked: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The guardians themselves – who will guard them?

No one. Nothing. The rot of US government corruption in the age of Obama and the Clintons is discovered to be ever deeper, ever wider. There is no bottom, there is no limit.

Breitbart reports on FBI Director James Comey who, as a top guardian of the law, could single-handedly have saved America (and the world) from the appalling possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency by recommending her prosecution for the high crimes she had committed – and didn’t do it.

What held him back?

It emerges that in his own mind, the Director of the FBI owes a higher loyalty to Hillary Clinton than to America.

A review of FBI Director James Comey’s professional history and relationships shows that the Obama cabinet leader — now under fire for his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton — is deeply entrenched in the big-money cronyism culture of Washington, D.C. His personal and professional relationships — all undisclosed as he announced the Bureau would not prosecute Clinton — reinforce bipartisan concerns that he may have politicized the criminal probe.

These concerns focus on millions of dollars that Comey accepted from a Clinton Foundation defense contractor, Comey’s former membership on a Clinton Foundation corporate partner’s board, and his surprising financial relationship with his brother Peter Comey, who works at the law firm that does the Clinton Foundation’s taxes.

When President Obama nominated Comey to become FBI director in 2013, Comey promised the United States Senate that he would recuse himself on all cases involving former employers.

But Comey earned $6 million in one year alone from Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin became a Clinton Foundation donor that very year. 

Comey served as deputy attorney general under John Ashcroft for two years of the Bush administration. When he left the Bush administration, he went directly to Lockheed Martin and became vice president, acting as a general counsel. …

Lockheed Martin is a Clinton Foundation donor. The company admitted to becoming a Clinton Global Initiative member in 2010. According to records, Lockheed Martin is also a member of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, which paid Bill Clinton $250,000 to deliver a speech in 2010. In 2010, Lockheed Martin won 17 approvals for private contracts from the Hillary Clinton State Department. 

In 2013, Comey became a board member, a director, and a Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee member of the London bank HSBC Holdings. … HSBC Holdings and its various philanthropic branches routinely partner with the Clinton Foundation. …

Breitbart found that James Comey owns the mortgage on his brother Peter’s house. Does Peter Comey also have a connection to the Clintons?

When our source called the Chinatown offices of D.C. law firm DLA Piper and asked for “Peter Comey”,  a receptionist immediately put him through to Comey’s direct line. But Peter Comey is not featured on the DLA Piper website. Peter Comey serves as “Senior Director of Real Estate Operations for the Americas” for DLA Piper.

James Comey was not questioned about his relationship with Peter Comey in his confirmation hearing.

DLA Piper is the firm that performed the “independent” audit of the Clinton Foundation in November during Clinton-World’s first big push to put the email scandal behind them.

DLA Piper’s employees taken as a whole represent a major Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign donation bloc and Clinton Foundation donation base. DLA Piper ranks #5 on Hillary Clinton’s all-time career Top Contributors list, just ahead of Goldman Sachs. 

So there never was the remotest chance that James Comey, head of the FBI, would recommend the prosecution of Hillary Clinton. And Attorney General Loretta Lynch, head of the Department of Justice, surely knew that perfectly well when she said she would accept Comey’s recommendation, “whatever it was”.

In or out of the White House, the Clintons rule.