Comey’s Lack of Memory was ‘Truly Stunning’

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Fist Bumping at the DOJ?

Trump’s Internal Resistance Celebrates. There were smiles—and fear that the anonymous New York Times op-ed could backfire on those inside the bureaucracy trying to blunt the president. Some officials interviewed by The Daily Beast cheered the underlying message of the anonymously written op-ed. But several worried about its lasting impact, beyond provoking a familiar Washington parlor game: outing a dissenter.

Handling the fallout of politically motivated anonymous quotes or leaks is a rite of passage for every president. Early in Barack Obama’s administration, a 66-page report on the future course of the Afghanistan war, penned by then-commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was sent to Bob Woodward before the president had announced his formal decision. Later in his time in office, a White House official famously described Obama’s foreign policy as “leading from behind.” “It was sort of a breach of the Obama ethos,” said one top aide from Obama’s comms shop. “But on the scale of everything we were dealing with, it was a small deal.”

What Trump is confronting now is far different, veterans of past White House stressed. The leaks and anonymous quotes aren’t being offered to influence a political outcome or force the president’s hand one way or another. The piece thrust much of Washington, D.C., into a whodunit mystery, with rampant speculation about the authorship and outright shock from veterans of White Houses past that it happened at all. Matt Bennett, a former Clinton aide, emailed, “Even during the impeachment, when all of us were horrified by his personal conduct, no one in the Clinton White House (or administration) would EVER have done anything like this… I can’t imagine this happening in any modern presidency other than Nixon’s.”

At the Department of Justice—which has been eyed suspiciously by the White House for nearly two years as a source of insubordination—the atmosphere was tense Thursday morning. Two officials inside the department said they’ve been passively resisting the president since he took office in 2017. “We see ourselves as rebels,” one official said laughing, adding that the op-ed marked a perfect time to celebrate. “We even went around fist-bumping each other,” another official said. But a third, who feels similarly about Trump, sounded darker notes about where Trump’s ire over public embarrassment could lead.

(Daily Beast)
H/T- Konan The Bar Barron 

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He Plays the Pitiful Political Hack & Shabby Radical to the End.

The Spectator

"The real story about John Brennan’s security clearance is not that he lost it under a Republican president, but that he even had one at all. One of the peculiar footnotes of Brennan’s history is that he obtained a position in Bill Casey’s CIA after having supported the Soviet-backed American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War. Had Casey conducted the polygraph test in which Brennan admitted to voting for Soviet proxy Gus Hall in 1976, Casey would have tossed him out of the office. Casey hated communists. Whoever hired Brennan must have been a Deep State holdover from the Carter years. 

All of Brennan’s propaganda about “Trump-Russian collusion” is just sour grapes over the loss of his preferred candidate, Hillary, for whom he was desperately auditioning by launching an unfounded investigation into her opponent, and a remnant of his pro-Soviet nostalgia. Brennan’s much-vaunted “conscience” was pricked not by Soviet leaders who slaughtered their own people and enslaved hapless nations but by a Russian leader who — brace yourselves — isn’t keen on postmodern Western propaganda in favor of gay rights.

Brennan prided himself on his “commitment” to alternative lifestyles and would pad down the halls of the CIA in a “rainbow lanyard,” as Bill Gertz once reported. Putin’s refusal to hold “gay pride” parades in Moscow infuriated Brennan. He also didn’t care for Putin’s unsentimental approach to Islamic terrorism. Brennan defined jihad as “self-improvement” and lobbied Obama to embrace the fanatics of the Muslim Brotherhood. Brennan got his wish when the Obama-backed Morsi rose to power in Egypt and wrecked it. Michael Flynn thought that Brennan was a PC jackass of the first order, in thrall to the Muslims with whom he had traveled to Mecca during his stint as station chief in Saudi Arabia. 

The only criticism that Trump deserves for yanking Brennan’s security clearance is its delay. He should have done it on day one. Brennan was a security risk from the start — an anti-American radical of staggering proportions who should never have been permitted within a hundred-mile radius of Langley." - Read More

* Thank You MJA for the Linkage!

A Creepy Partisan Weasel of the First Order.

The cockiness of Peter Strzok at Thursday’s hearing is a reflection of the immunity that ruling-class mandarins enjoy in liberal Washington. He was testifying from the safety of the deep state and thus knew that he could lie his head off without consequence. How else to explain his unrepentant opening statement, with its blatant anti-Trump special pleading? The statement sounded like it had been written by Rachel Maddow, resting on the lamest and hackiest of MSNBC-style talking points, that “today’s hearing is just another victory notch in Putin’s belt and another milestone in our enemies’ campaign to tear America apart.”

Strzok insulted everyone’s intelligence by insinuating that something other than Hillary’s opposition research had spurred the FBI to investigate her opponent. He couldn’t tell the committee what that was, of course, lest that threaten an “ongoing investigation.” But, trust him, that something was really, really “significant.”

The Strzok on display at the hearing was the same arrogant bureaucrat on display in the texts — an abusive, ruling-class jerk who still thinks he deserves a place on the Mueller probe. Making Mueller look like an ass and cementing his probe’s reputation as a partisan clown show, Strzok insisted that his removal from it had nothing to do with unprofessional behavior but with a mere “appearance” problem, one he blamed not on his own conduct but on Republicans “misinterpreting” his texts. This is chutzpah on a breathtaking scale, which would be inconceivable were the target of his blundering espionage anyone other than Trump. Strzok’s “insurance policy” against Trump had a provision for his career too. He would survive exposure by wrapping himself in the protective gauze of the anti-Trump resistance. - George Neumayr

When Democrats Do It, It's Called Opposition Research

An article in the British leftist rag 'The Guardian' titled 'Revealed: Trump Team Hired Spy Firm for ‘Dirty Ops’ on Iran Arms Deal', a story supposedly authored through the Guardian's online mouth piece 'The Observer', makes the claim aides to Donald Trump hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran Nuclear Deal. The piece goes on to say that according to "incendiary documents" shown the Observer by unnamed sources, of course, revealed investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Obama's former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl, a national security adviser to the former VP Joe Biden.

After quotes from pompous British diplomats railing about how "bloody outrageous" such activity is, the author of the piece tells us of the oh-so nefarious inquirers:

"Among things they were looking at were personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal. Investigators were also apparently told to contact prominent Iranian Americans as well as pro-deal journalists – from the New York Times, MSNBC television, the Atlantic, Vox website and Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper among others – who had frequent contact with Rhodes and Kahl in an attempt to establish whether they had violated any protocols by sharing sensitive intelligence. 

They are believed to have looked at comments made by Rhodes in which he admitted relying on "inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion" to secure the deal...." 

The report go on to say it is not clear how much work was actually undertaken, for how long or what became of any material, if any at all was unearthed.  And whether it appears unseemly or not, in today's world it's pretty tame stuff. It's call gathering information or as the democrats call such  things, like the  Steele Dossier, "Opposition Research".

With all that is come to light about the secretive and underhanded actions of Barky O's administration, coupled with the revelation that for the second time in two months John Kerry met with Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif Khonsari to apparently strategise against the US government, makes this story if true, probably a necessary step in counter-intelligence. Or, it could just be another exaggerated deep state smear story planted with a foreign anti-Trump/anti- Israeli media source known for getting their limey pantaloons in a twist over most everything DJT.

Is This Really a Look Inside the Deep State That Threatens the Trump Presidency?

Note: It's no secret there are forces afoot that are determined to bring down Donald Trump and his presidency.  Who that are, no one knows.  I post this news story without any certainty of it's believability. I will let the reader decide. It could itself be part a misinformation campaign. I ran across this on a website called Third Estate NewsGroup.  It is a fairly new site, leaning towards current affairs. It looks legit, but in this day and age, you never know. The events of the this week in particular make it a mind grabbing story, but my suspensions were raised as to the method the information you're about to read was accessed. I urge the reader to read it with a grain of salt. That said, if true, we could have our first glimpse into a coming dark chapter in American history.  - Diogenes

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"The possible existence of a subversive American “Deep State” has captivated the attention of political observers and supporters of President Trump for months, and for the first time, evidence has allegedly surfaced that casts a light on the shadowy operations of a group many claim is working to bring down the Presidency. This information comes as President Trump is battling his worst week in Washington so far. In the past seven days, a constant stream of leaks and unsourced stories have sent the Trump White House into a tail-spin, and calls for his impeachment have grown.

On Wednesday night, just hours after the Dept. of Justice appointed a Special Prosecutor to handle the Trump/Russia probe, a series of screenshots began spreading around the Dark Web, a colloquial term for the portion of the Internet that is unlisted in search engines and requires special encrypted software to access. The Dark Web is known as the “Internet home” to those who wish to communicate anonymously and hacker groups like Anonymous.

An unidentified user going by “FreshCamel” posted on several Dark Web message boards Wednesday evening asking other users to help him make sense of communications he had intercepted on a messaging platform called Gliph, a secure messaging service that uses end-to-end encryption to prevent communications from being tracked back to those who sent them. This individual did not provide much context regarding the source of these communications, but American users quickly put the pieces together.

On initial inspection, the screenshots, which are printed in their entirety below, appear to be taken from a short, highly-coded conversation held between approximately 5 individuals in the United States intelligence community on Wednesday, May 17th from 2:31 pm to 3:15 pm.

Third Estate Newsgroup’s Contributing Editor Micah Bull worked to make contact with “FreshCamel” late Wednesday night via an encrypted email service, and this individual confirmed that he had accessed the personal computer of an employee at the FBI sometime around April 24th. This access had been obtained through a falsified “phishing” email that installed spyware on this employee’s computer when opened. “FreshCamel” declined to identify this individual for the time being, but confirmed that he or she is a higher-level employee in the Bureau. 

According to “FreshCamel,” this individual’s computer is used to join a secured chat channel on Gliph approximately four times per week for exactly 45 minutes each session. Activity has increased in recent days, “FreshCamel” confirmed. For weeks, “FreshCamel” casually monitored these chats without realizing what they were, but when a topic of discussion in Wednesday’s chat became a major news story in the United States just hours after the chat was closed, he decided to seek help.

These screenshots (shown below) show a 45 minute chat on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 17. From 2:31 pm to 3:15 pm, 5 separate users sent a total of 20 messages. “FreshCamel” confirmed that there were a total of 13 users “present” in the chat room, but the users known as “Severus,” “Roger,” “Huck,” “Juules,” and “Dooku” are those who consistently speak the most in these daily chats.

The chat begins with mention of “RR” and Mueller, hours before Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that former FBI Director Robert Mueller would be named as the Special Prosecutor handling the probe into the Trump campaign’s communications with Russia. The users admit that the news will “blindside” the White House.

Then, the topic of conversation turns to an individual referred to as “MF” and whether or not these users should work to “put [him] back in the news.” They eventually agree that an individual known as “S” will work to draft a “memo” somehow connecting “MF” to Turkey and the user known as “Huck” will use a secured connection with their “friends in New York.”

On Thursday, a major story broke that former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had accepted money from the Turkish government and then intervened on their behalf in U.S. military operations. Flynn and Trump associates have denied these reports, but Flynn remains the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation.

See the Screenshots and the rest of the story in detail HERE