The Russia collusion investigation led by then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller was artificially prolonged in the hope that President Donald Trump would move to terminate it and thus be accused of obstruction of justice, according to former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker. Whitaker, who led the Department of Justice (DOJ) between Nov. 7, 2018, and Feb. 14, 2019, said that, in his opinion, the Mueller team acted inappropriately to create an “obstruction of justice trap” for Trump and his officials. Former FBI Director Mueller was appointed by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 to take over an FBI counterintelligence investigation to determine whether the 2016 Trump campaign colluded with Russia to sway the election.

By March 2019, Mueller had wrapped it up, saying the probe was unable to establish that any such collusion took place. Mueller, however, already knew this in 2018, Whitaker told Jan Jekielek, host of The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” series. Soon after taking command at the DOJ, Whitaker was briefed “on the contours and what was the Mueller investigation,” he said. “There was no evidence of any criminal conspiracy or connection or collusion, whatever you want to call it, between the Trump campaign, members of the Trump campaign—including Donald Trump—and the Russian government. So, therefore, the primary and sole purpose of that investigation had essentially failed to generate any evidence, and it was clear that that had been known for some time.” Keeping such an investigation open isn’t the “regular order at the Department of Justice,” according to Whitaker. He offered a theory as to why it happened. Original article: https://www.theepochtimes.com/ex-acti…

 

"They knew they had nothing, but using their official power they created and perpetuated the facade of an investigation"

 

By Gregg Jarrett
TheGreggJarrett.com

John Dowd, one of the lead lawyers who represented President Trump during Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion, said Tuesday that the special counsel engineered a perjury trap for Trump in the exact same way that James Comey’s FBI invented a trap for former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
 

 

“Mueller’s scheme was the same one captured in the (newly released) FBI set-up notes pertaining to Flynn. They knew they had nothing, but using their official power they created and perpetuated the facade of an investigation,” said Dowd.

In an extensive interview on Tuesday, Dowd explained to me how his commitment of cooperation and transparency in dealing with Mueller was eventually turned against the president, as the special counsel “misled” Trump’s legal team in order to manufacture a crime where none existed.

They knew they had nothing, but using their official power they created and perpetuated the facade of an investigation

According to Dowd, Mueller learned early in his investigation that there was no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion to influence the 2016 presidential election. He admitted it during a meeting with the president’s lawyers on March 5, 2018. So, Mueller shifted to a legally contorted interpretation of obstruction of justice in order to keep his investigation afloat.

On Tuesday, Dowd elaborated on how the special counsel deceived the Trump team:

“As I look back, we had the most perfect trusting relationship with Mueller based on his word and handshake, which held throughout. No paper. Word was solid. They received everything they asked for without a hitch or page missing, including the most intimate notes of conversations with and by POTUS (President of the United States). Every witness they requested testified truthfully. No lying. No grand jury testimony. Mueller affirmed all of this in our March 5 (2018) meeting. How could there be a whisper of obstruction under these circumstances?”

Despite no evidence of an underlying crime, Mueller insisted that the president be interviewed by the special counsel. Dowd knew it was a trap. Mueller had done it to Flynn and others. He was clearly angling for obstruction of justice and hoping to ensnare the president in the equivalent of a perjury trap if he consented to be interviewed.

But obstructing what? Mueller readily acknowledged that there was no underlying crime. Moreover, Trump had encouraged every witness connected to his campaign and the White House to testify. He voluntarily produced more than a million pages of documents. The special counsel’s investigation had proceeded unimpeded.

As Mueller persisted, Trump’s lawyer realized that he had been conned all along. On Tuesday, Dowd was unsparing in his scorn for Mueller and his unscrupulous tactics:

“That is when I knew he had lied to me in our original meeting (June 16, 2017) and every meeting thereafter. Robert Mueller —‘D.C.’s great man’ — completely and deliberately misled us in order to set up a perjury/false statement trap for POTUS. It was a monstrous lie and scheme to defraud.”

Dowd shared with me numerous documents and letters supporting his accusations against Mueller. They paint a vivid picture of a special counsel determined to damage the president with an investigation bereft of any credible evidence.

Tucker Carlson began “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Thursday by addressing the Justice Department’s decision to drop its case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

“There is a passionate debate underway right now among political partisans over the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case against General Flynn. They’re screaming,” Carlson said. “But there shouldn’t be a debate because there actually isn’t a debate about why the case was dropped. We already know. DOJ officials explained it in detail today.”

“Michael Flynn did not commit a crime and they knew it. How did they know? Because the FBI had already tapped Michael Flynn’s phone, which itself is a shocking outrage, completely unacceptable in a free country,” Carlson said. “But for some reason, nobody in Washington seems to notice or care about it. They should.”

[…] “We almost didn’t find out what really happened in this case. Michael Flynn almost went to prison. And that gets to the nub of all of this. Most important question of all, how often does the FBI set people up?” Carlson asked. “How many other lives have they destroyed without the public knowing about it? In other words, this isn’t about Michael Flynn. It’s about you.”

As I’m sure Tucker knows, it’s a list a mile long — going back decades.

 

The Department of Justice is reportedly dropping its prosecution of former National Security Adviser General Michael Flynn (Ret.), according to the Associated Press.

🚨🚨 SCOOP –> WASHINGTON (AP) — Justice Department is dropping criminal case against ex-Trump adviser Flynn, according to court filing obtained by AP.

— Mike Balsamo (@MikeBalsamo1) May 7, 2020

 

By Joel B. Pollak
Breitbart.com

The news comes a week after new evidence released to Flynn’s lawyers showed FBI agents apparently attempting to trap Flynn into lying to them, hoping he would be prosecuted or fired. The evidence also suggested they knew he had not committed a separate crime.

Earlier Thursday, prosecutor Brandon Van Grack withdrew from the case.

Flynn had been director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama but was fired. He then joined Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, shaping its foreign policy and introducing Trump at rallies.

After Trump won, Flynn shaped the national security policies of the incoming administration and was picked to serve as National Security Adviser. In that capacity, he held conversations with foreign officials, including then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak were picked up by wiretaps of the ambassador, and his name was “unmasked” by Obama administration officials in transcripts of the conversations, which were leaked to the Washington Post. At the same time, the Obama Department of Justice investigated Flynn under the Logan Act of 1799, which prevents private citizens from conducting diplomacy but is rarely enforced.

Though the FBI found no evidence of wrongdoing — as shown in documents produced by the FBI to Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, last week — senior officials kept the case open.

Republican Rep. Jim Jordan sounds off after new documents are released on the 2017 questioning of Michael Flynn in the Russia probe.

"If you want to know why President Donald Trump was being targeted for impeachment/coup attack against him, it was because [the Deep State] didn’t want the DOJ to prosecute them for corruption," @JudicialWatch President @TomFitton.

 

JustTheNews.com

Attorneys for retired Gen. Michael Flynn asked a judge Friday to dismiss his criminal conviction immediately, saying new evidence belatedly turned over by federal prosecutors proves the former national security adviser to President Trump was framed in the Russia investigation.

“This afternoon, the government produced to Mr. Flynn stunning Brady evidence that proves Mr. Flynn’s allegations of having been deliberately set up and framed by corrupt agents at the top of the FBI,” Flynn’s attorneys said in an eight page filing

Brady evidence is pretrial information that could exonerate a defendant.

The attorneys also argued in the filings that the long-awaited evidence defeats any argument that a key interview with Flynn on January 24, 2017, was material to any “investigation.” The redacted documents were filed in a District of Columbia federal court as a supplement to Flynn’s court motion in January to dismiss charges against him. You can read the filing here.

By Thomas Lifson
AmericanThinker.com

Unfortunately, the shocking revelation that the Mueller Report misled the American people by omitting important evidence exonerating the Trump campaign of collusion with Russia will go mostly unnoticed with everyone focused on the pandemic. John Solomon, writing on his new site, Just The News, has another scoop that reveals that the translator present at the Trump Tower meeting with Russians who offered dirt on the Hillary campaign --  the very centerpiece of allegations of collusion – provided a lot of exculpatory information that was recorded in FBI 302 memoranda, but which was excluded by the Mueller Report. However, one relatively minor tidbit that reflected unfavorably on the meeting was included.

This should be shocking because Mueller and his team, led by Andrew Weissman, were hred to provide the truth, a complete picture. They were not hired to damage Trump as much as possible, but that appears to be what they were actually doing. I am no expert on legal ethics, but this strikes me as malfeasance.

By Sara Carter
SaraCarter.com

The Justice Department announced Thursday that an employee of the DIA pleaded guilty to leaking classified national defense information to two journalists in 2018 and 2019, which could land him in prison for a maximum of ten years.

Leaking classified information is, of course, against the law – that is, unless you are former FBI Director James Comey or former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. There are others too, for example a former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s international operations division, who also was called out by the DOJ’s Inspector General for allegedly leaking to reporters and accepting gifts from the media, as reported in The Washington Examiner.

Further, FBI officials altered Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant applications to spy on Carter Page, a U.S. citizen, who happened to be a volunteer for President Donald Trump’s campaign. Now, years later, after multiple investigations it was discovered that those same FBI officials, Comey and McCabe, among others, signed off on the phony warrants.

Still, senior government officials in the FBI – as well as other agencies – have escaped prosecution for leaking classified information and or lying under oath. Others have not been so lucky.

Defense Intelligence Agency employee Henry Kyle Frese is one of the unlucky leakers. Frese, a 31-year-old resident of Alexandria, Virginia, is expected to be sentenced on June 18.

Frese “was entrusted with Top Secret information related to the national defense of our country. Frese violated that trust, the oath he swore to uphold, and engaged in felonious conduct at the expense of our country. This case should serve as a clear reminder to all of those similarly entrusted with National Defense Information that unilaterally disclosing such information for personal gain, or that of others, is not selfless or heroic, it is criminal,” ” said G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Robert Wells, Acting Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division said “Frese violated his sworn oath to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States by using his access to the United States’ most sensitive information and steal state secrets for nothing more than personal gain. The men and women of the FBI who investigated this case swore the same oath but unlike Mr. Frese, they chose to uphold it. I am proud of the work they did to hold Mr. Frese accountable for his actions.”

There is no argument that Frese should pay the price for leaking classified national security information to the press but what does it say when the DOJ refuses to prosecute former senior FBI officials, who were referred for prosecution on similar grounds. What does it say when leadership within the FBI, like Comey, sets a precedent that leaking for personal convictions won’t land you in prison. Couldn’t Frese argue that same point?

Over the past three years it appears there is one set of rules for those with friends in high places and another set of rules for those without. Last year, nearly half a dozen federal employees with the “FBI, DEA, a U.S. attorney and U.S. marshal officials were allowed to retire, do volunteer work, or keep their jobs as they escaped criminal charges that everyday Americans probably would not,” as previously reported at The Hill.

Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers said Thursday that “Frese violated the trust placed in him by the American people when he disclosed sensitive national security information for personal gain.”

Isn’t that what former FBI Director Comey did when he leaked his memos to his lawyers – actually his friends – to turn over to the New York Times with the sole purpose of getting the DOJ to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate President Donald Trump. The information, however, regarding Trump was all based on disinformation that the FBI, led by Comey, knew had never been verified.

Horowitz’s report on Comey was scathing and he referred the former director of the bureau to the DOJ for criminal prosecution, however, the Justice Department declined prosecution.

Remember here’s what Horowitz said in his report on Comey: “Former Director Comey failed to live up to this responsibility. By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees—and the many thousands more former FBI employees—who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information.”

What about McCabe, and the other FBI officials called out in Horowitz’s reports, who were referred to the DOJ.

Well, in the case of McCabe, the DOJ also declined prosecution.

Horowitz referred McCabe in 2018 and wrote another damning report stating that the former deputy director of the bureau, who authorized the probe into President Trump, had lied under oath to investigators three times and another time when he was not under oath. McCabe also leaked information to regarding the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton to the Wall Street Journal. But nothing happened.

In fact, he was given his letter of freedom from the DOJ last week, despite lying and leaking. Shouldn’t senior level officials like McCabe and Comey be held to higher standards?

What is the public supposed to take away from our system of justice if it is so one-sided and what does this mean when we entrust our institutions to be fair and non-partisan but then find out is everything but fair or non-partisan.

Timothy R. Slater, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, said Thursday that Frese’s “disseminating ‘classified information he had pledged to protect” puts our  “national defense equities in danger.”

“The US Government and the American public depend on trusted government employees to keep such information out of the hands of our adversaries, who could use it to cause us harm,” said Slater. “The FBI’s counterintelligence mission is to protect our country’s information and secrets in order to safeguard our future; and the men and women of the FBI will continue to work hard to preserve that information.”

What about protecting the actual system of government and the constitution that is there to ensure that all Americans are treated equally under the law?

What about an FBI that was so out of control that its leadership felt they could lie, leak and spy on a duly elected president with impunity.

And why is no-one at the FBI, either current employees or former, being held to the same standards as Frese?

On Friday the FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was exonerated after admitting to leaking classified information to the press and lying about it under oath several times.

On Friday we also learned the conduct at the Obama FBI under James Comey, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe and others was much worse than we thought.

Last night author Lee Smith joined Jason Chaffetz on The Ingraham Angle on Friday night to discuss the latest developments in the Spygate scandal.

The more we learn – the more corruption is revealed at the top levels of the Obama intelligence community.

On Friday Eric Felton at Real Clear Investigations observed: “Buried in IG Report: How an FBI Team in Rome Gave Steele Highly Guarded Secrets.”

Felton points to a meeting in Rome a month before the 2016 election:

A month before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI met Christopher Steele in Rome and apparently unlawfully shared with the foreign opposition researcher some of the bureau’s most closely held secrets, according to unpublicized disclosures in the recent Justice Department Inspector General report on abuses of federal surveillance powers.

What’s more, Steele, the former British spy who compiled the “dossier” of conspiracy theories for the Hillary Clinton campaign, was promised $15,000 to attend the briefing by FBI agents eager to maintain his cooperation in their Trump-Russia collusion investigation codenamed Crossfire Hurricane.

That investigation was so closely guarded that only a handful of top officials and agents at the FBI were allowed to know about it.

The report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz details how a team of FBI agents in early October 2016 shared with Steele extensive classified materials, just weeks before the bureau cut off ties with him for leaking his own research to the media. The secrets included foreign intelligence information still considered so sensitive that the IG’s report refers to it even now only as coming from a “Friendly Foreign Government.” In fact, this is a reference to Australia. That country’s ambassador to Britain sent the United States a tip about loose talk by junior Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. The FBI has described that as the predicate for its Trump-Russia investigation.

The IG report also discloses that FBI agents knew Steele worked for Glenn Simpson, whose opposition research firm Fusion GPS was paying Steele to dig up dirt on Trump for the Clinton campaign, and that Steele informed the FBI that the “candidate” – Clinton herself – knew about Steele’s work.

According to Lee Smith, the information sharing between the Clinton campaign and the DOJ-FBI was much more extensive than previously reported.