By Terry Haynes
TheDailyCaller.com

New evidence points to collusion between the Department of Justice and FBI at a pivotal moment in the Hillary Clinton email probe, according to emails recently reviewed by Fox News.

The February 2016 emails were written in the aftermath of 22 messages labeled “Top Secret” having been found on Clinton’s private email server from her 2009-2013 tenure as secretary of state.

In congressional testimony, former FBI Director James Comey dismissed notions of DOJ-FBI coordination during their look into the matter, specifically denying any conspiracy with the Department of Justice in his advisement against pursuing charges in the Clinton case in July of 2016.

By contrast, however, in a letter issued Wednesday, Republican North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows noted communication that, in his view, designated points of possible collusion at “crucial moments of the investigation.”

The messages examined by Fox began on February 8, 2016, at which time FBI Head of Counterintelligence Bill Priestap was informed by Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Gregory Starr that the State Department was ready to bring to justice those responsible for the reckless care of top secret information. Starr wrote, “The Department of State is prepared to take appropriate action for any instances of mishandling of classified information in accordance with our own internal processes.”

Starr made clear his wish to not hamper the FBI’s continuing inquiry, adding that — if directed — he would postpone any “administrative action” until the conclusion of the bureau’s case.

On February 13th — five days later — FBI criminal division and Office of General Counsel member Jonathan Moffa, FBI agent Peter Strzok and constituents of the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia received a message from an unnamed senior official at the DOJ’s National Security Division, saying, “Wanted to make sure that DOJ is kept in the loop as response is drafted. We have discussed a bit more here at CES [counterintelligence and export control section] and have some additional thoughts on the best response on the admin action question. Can we make sure we discuss as a group as response is put together?”

Ultimately, the State Department declined to take action regarding the 22 security-sensitive Clinton emails. By the time the FBI review was over in July of 2016, several key players at the State Department had resigned.

On Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and FBI Director Christopher Wray were petitioned by Republican South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy to review the allegations of coordination between the DOJ and the FBI in the Clinton probe.

By Mary Chastain
LegalInsurrection.com

Congress received the memos from former FBI Director James Comey on his meetings with President Donald Trump. What I found interesting is what is not in the memos: Evidence of collusion or an attempt to obstruct the FBI.

Loyalty

The first meeting between the men happened on January 6, 2017. In that meeting, Comey told Trump that “the Russians allegedly had tapes involving him and prostitutes at the Presidential Suite at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow from about 2013.” You know, the infamous “golden showers” portion of the dossier. Trump replied that “there were no prostitutes, there were never prostitutes.”

Comey told Trump that media outlets like CNN and others had the information, but that “it was important that we not give them an excuse to write that the FBI has the material or” something else that is blacked out. He told Trump that the FBI was “keeping it very close-hold.”

Well, after that meeting, the dossier appeared at BuzzFeed and that the intelligence community told Trump about these allegations.

This leads us to the next meeting when Comey dined with Trump at the White House on January 28, 2017. The two men discussed leaks and Comey wrote that Trump like other presidents “would discover the entire government leaks like crazy and explained that it often comes from the first or second hop out from those actually working on the sensitive thing.”

Trump told Comey “that he needed loyalty and expected loyalty.”

Okay, so after this came out, everyone immediately said that Trump demanded loyalty from Comey. But from the sound of it, Trump meant from everyone that surrounds him. It sounds like he doesn’t want leaks to happen and protect sensitive information. Byron York explained at The Washington Examiner:

Why would Trump wonder about the FBI director’s loyalty? Perhaps because in their first meeting, the FBI director dropped the Moscow sex allegation on Trump, followed immediately by its publication in the media. It seems entirely reasonable for a president to wonder what was going on and whether the FBI director was loyal, not to the president personally, but to the confidentiality that is required in his role as head of the nation’s chief investigative agency.

A few more things. We had known earlier that Comey briefed Trump about the dossier one-on-one on January 6, 2017. But it was not until an interview Thursday with CNN’s Jake Tapper that Comey revealed the conversation was only about the Moscow sex allegation. The other parts of the dossier — about Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, allegations of collusion — Comey did not mention to the president-elect. No wonder Trump associated the dossier with the Moscow sex story.

York also mentioned that the media couldn’t believe that Trump obsessed over the supposed incident in Moscow. Now we know that is the only subject Comey briefed him on in the very first meeting. If Comey told him all about the dossier and Trump only concentrated on that hotel room incident then yes, he was obsessive. But Comey only spoke about the “golden showers.”

At the dinner, Comey wrote that Trump “thought very highly of” him, but “would understand if” he wanted to walk away. Comey said he enjoyed his job. Later on, Trump told Comey he was glad that Comey wanted to stay and heard great things about him. Trump also reiterated that he “wanted competence and independence and didn’t want the FBI involved in policy.”

Trump then said he wanted “honest loyalty” and Comey replied that he would “get that from me.” Comey even admitted in the memo that it’s quite “possible we understood that phrase differently, but I chose to understand it as consistent with what I had said throughout the conversation: I will serve the President with loyalty to the office, the country, and the truth.”

Again, it doesn’t sound like Trump wanted Comey to do as the president wanted or said. It sounds like he wanted the FBI to do what it’s meant to do.

By Ben Shapiro
TheDailyWire

On Thursday, contemporaneous memos written by then-FBI director James Comey regarding meetings with President Trump were revealed to Congress . . . and within minutes, were leaked to the media. There wasn’t much in the memos we hadn’t already heard from Comey, of course. But here’s what you need to know.

1. Comey Leaked The Memos To Prompt A Special Counsel In The First Place. After Comey’s firing, he leaked the memos to a “close friend” so that the press would see them, intending to prompt a special counsel investigation into his firing. The theory was that the memos showed that Comey was hot on Trump’s trail on the Russia investigation, and that Trump fired Comey in order to obstruct justice. Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017, “I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. I didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.” But there’s nothing in the memos that suggests Trump was actually attempting to obstruct justice.

2. The Letter From The DOJ To Congress Suggests Portions Of The Memo Were Classified. Comey said he hadn’t broken the law by showing the memos to a third party, because they were unclassified personal “recollection.” But the letter from the DOJ to Congress states, “Therefore, pursuant to your request, we are providing the requested memoranda in both redacted and unredacted formats for your convenience. … The unredacted documents are classified, and we will provide those in a separate, secure transmittal to the House Security office tomorrow.” This seems to suggest that Comey was wrong about the level of classification the memos required, meaning he could have broken the law — although Comey says he only leaked one of the memos to his friend, and that one was unclassified.

Chris Wallace: "It seems to me that the real story in this book is that there's no new hard evidence of any crime, of anything illegal, and it doesn't really change the equation on President Trump."  Also Chris can't believe how "bitchy" the book is.

By Daniel Greenfield
FrontPageMag.com

In the early seventies, political operatives disguised as delivery men broke into a Washington D.C. office. These efforts to spy on the political opposition would culminate in what we know as Watergate.

In the late teens, political operatives disguised as FBI agents, NSA personnel and other employees of the Federal government eavesdropped, harassed and raided the offices of the political opposition.

The raids of Michael Cohen’s hotel room, home and office are just this week’s Watergate.

Political operatives have now seized privileged communications between the President of the United States and his lawyer. Despite fairy tales about a clean process, these communications will be harvested by the counterparts of Peter Strzok, who unlike him are still on the case at the FBI, some of it will appear in the Washington Post and the New York Times, and some will be passed along to other political allies.

That’s what happened at every juncture of Watergate 2.0. And it only follows that it will happen again.

Just like the eavesdropping, the process will be compartmentalized for maximum plausible deniability. The leakers will be protected by their superiors. The media will shrilly focus the public’s attention on the revelations in the documents rather than on the more serious crimes committed in obtaining them.

Nixon couldn’t have even dreamed of doing this in his wildest fantasies. But Obama could and did. Now his operatives throughout the government are continuing the work that they began during his regime.

Attorney-client privilege is just one of those rights we have to give up to protect ourselves from a conspiracy theory invented by the Clinton campaign. (But no amount of dead Americans can ever justify ending immigration from Islamic terror states or deporting illegal alien gang members.)

We are at the latest stage of a process that began when the Clinton campaign funded a dossier alleging foreign ties by her political opponent. It did this using a law firm while lying on its FEC disclosures about payments to that firm. (But unlike Cohen, Hillary’s lawyers will never be raided by the FBI.)

That dossier was then used to justify eavesdropping on Trump associates by political allies in the State Department, the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Council. This wasn’t really breaking new ground. Obama had already been caught using the NSA to spy on members of Congress opposed to his Iran Deal. 

The contents of the dossier were rambling nonsense. Its claims about Michael Cohen were easily disproven. But that covert investigation was transformed into an overt one with Mueller. And Mueller’s very public investigation follows the same path as the secret investigation by Obama associates. Both used the dubious claims of the Clinton dossier as the starting point for an endless fishing expedition.

Eavesdrop enough, raid enough, squeeze enough and you will eventually find something. And even if you don’t, you can always manipulate them into denying something and nail them for lying to the FBI.

Keep squeezing and maybe you’ll even find someone willing to lie under oath for you.

Mueller has yet to deliver on Russian collusion. But Susan Rice and Samantha Power couldn’t do it either. Instead they all assembled a vast network of international conspiracy theories whose only purpose is to justify more raids, more eavesdropping and more fishing expeditions. 

These are the police state tactics usually used by Communist dictatorships where domestic security agencies accuse the political opposition of treason, spy on them, raid their homes on fake charges and then look for anything that can be used to put them away. Just like in Russia. And for the same reasons.

Russian domestic security agencies, from the KGB to the FSB, used these tactics against political opponents who might pose a threat to their rule. That is exactly what’s happening here.

This isn’t just an ideological war. Washington D.C. is fighting to suppress a political revolution.

Even Obama and Hillary’s political operatives couldn’t have pushed the DOJ and other agencies this far outside their comfort zone under ordinary circumstances. There had been previous abuses of power, under JFK, LBJ, Nixon and Clinton, but there has been nothing like this since the Alien and Sedition Acts or Madison’s Machiavellian scapegoating of the Federalists for the disastrous War of 1812.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton on how the FBI raided the home and office of President Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) said that if Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein does not turn over the unredacted documents requested by Congress related to FISA, FBI and more then impeachment could be in order.

By Frank Kink
CBS News

DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – Civil Liberties attorney Alan Dershowitz said Wednesday that he is fearful of the criminalization of political differences in today’s discourse and that he doesn’t think special counsels are the right way to approach criminal justice.

Dershowitz spoke to CBS 11 political reporter Jack Fink about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to affect the outcome of the 2016 election.

“I think the investigation should end and I think the Congress should appoint a special non-partisan commission,” said Dershowitz. He said he thinks a Congressional committee would be too partisan.

The DOJ inspector general will investigate potential FISA abuses by the DOJ and FBI. House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Devin Nunes weighs in on ‘Hannity.’
 

“The deep state is the intelligence agencies that do not have oversight”
 

By Steve Watson
Prison Planet.com

During an appearance on The Laura Ingraham Show this week, Senator Rand Paul warned that “Absolutely, there is a deep state” and that it is actively working to “try to bring Trump down.”

“The deep state is the intelligence agencies that do not have oversight,” Paul said, adding “Only eight people in Congress know what they’re doing, and traditionally, those eight people have been a rubber stamp to let the intelligence communities do whatever they want.”

The Senator was referring to the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate, in addition to the chairmen and ranking members of the two intelligence committees.

“There is no skeptic among the eight people that are supposedly overseeing the intelligence community.” Paul warned.