Deconstructing The Almighty Russian Hackers Myth

Authored by Patrick Armstrong via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Sometimes things can be made more complicated than they really are.

And such is the case with the story that the Russian government hacked the Democratic National Committee so as to help Trump become president.

In July 2016 Wikileaks released a number of documents showing that the nomination of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for president had been rigged. A month earlier the DNC had announced it had been "hacked" and the cybersecurity company it hired announced that the Russians had done it – one of the reasons they gave was that the hackers had helpfully left the name of the Polish founder of the Soviet security forces as a clue.

Since then, this story has been broadly accepted and it has spun on and on for eighteen months. But it doesn"t really make any sense.

Let us pretend that Moscow wanted Trump to win. Let us further pretend that Moscow thought that there was a chance that he could win despite the fact that almost all news outlets, pollsters and pundits were completely confident that he could not. And let us pretend that Moscow thought that, with its thumb on the scale, Trump could make it. And, the fourth if, let us pretend that Moscow decided to put its thumb on the scale.

How to do it? Let us pretend (number five) that the strategy was to try and discredit Clinton. Let us further assume (this assumption is the one that"s probably true) that Moscow has very good electronic intelligence capacities. So, we imagine the scene in headquarters as they look for an approach; they quickly find one that is very good, a second that is pretty good and a third area that is worth digging around in.

The Russians would know all about the Uranium One matter where, as even the Clinton-friendly NYT admitted, "a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation". It would be very easy for them to package this as a case of Secretary of State Clinton selling US policy for personal profit. Russian intelligence organisations would have a great deal of true information and would find it easy to manufacture material to fill in any gaps in the story. Presented as a case of corruption and near treason, the story could have done a great deal of damage to her. And, given that it had happened six years earlier, all the details would have been known and ready to be used. It would have been a very powerful attack that even the complaint media would have had difficulty ignoring.

We know, and it"s very likely that the Russians did too, that she ran a private e-mail server on which there were thousands and thousands of official communications. The server was very insecure and we can assume that Russia"s signals intelligence (and everyone else"s, for that matter) had penetrated it. Think of all the real material from that source that could be revealed or twisted to make a scandal. That would make quite a campaign. Further, it is a reasonable assumption that Russian intelligence would have some of the thousands of e-mails that were "bleached". There would be enough material for a months-long campaign of leaks.

Finally, Hillary Clinton has been in public life for many years and there would have been ample opportunities, and, many would say, ample material in her scandal-plagued career, for the construction of many campaigns to weaken her appeal.

So, a preliminary look would suggest that there were several angles of attack of which Uranium One would be the easiest and most effective.

But, failing that, or as a supplement to that, there was plenty of embarrassing and incriminating material in her illicit private server.

Now we have to pretend (number six), contrary to the universal practice of security organs in all times and places, that the (always assumed in the story to be implacably hostile) Russians would decide to forgo the chance of compromising a future POTUS in favour of a harebrained scheme to get another elected.

But we"re supposed to believe that they did. The Russians, the story goes, with all this potential material, with a solid hit with Uranium One, decide instead to expose the finagling inside the Democratic Party structure. And to expose it too late to make any difference. As I said at the beginning, sometimes things are easier to understand when you, as it were, turn them upside down.

In the middle of June 2016 the DNC admits that its documents have been obtained – a "hack" they insist – and almost immediately, "Guccifer 2.0" pops up to claim responsibility and the DNC"s experts (Crowdstrike) claim Russia was behind it. A month passes before Wikileaks releases the first batch of DNC documents showing the extent of the manipulation of the process by Clinton – who had, according to most counts – already secured the nomination about two weeks before. A couple of days before the release, Trump gets the Republican nomination and a couple of days after that Clinton easily wins the Democratic nomination by a thousand-vote majority.

So, the first thing that should have occurred to the observer (but didn"t) was, if the Russians had had this incriminating evidence that the Democratic Party nomination had been fixed in Clinton"s favour, wouldn"t it have been more useful to put it out at a time when Sanders who was, after all, the swindled one, might have been able to do something about it? Instead those supposedly clever Russian state hackers dropped the news out at a time when it made very little difference. No difference in fact: Clinton got the nomination and there was no comeback from Sanders" people.

So, the "Russian hackers" made their arrow, shot it, hit the target and... no one cared. The people who devoutly believe in the Russian hacking story now have to explain (but don"t) why the Russian state, apparently so determined to bring Clinton down, didn"t immediately hit her with the Uranium One documents and anything else they had that could feed the flames of scandal.

But, as we all know, they didn"t. While long rumoured, and even briefly reported on, we only learned of Uranium One in a big way in October 2017 and the fact that her server contained Special Access material (the very highest classified secrets) was confirmed authoritatively only in November 2017. If the Russian had really had this sort of information and the hostility to Clinton that we"re incessantly told that they had, two years earlier would have been the time.

So, on the one hand we are supposed to believe that the Russian government is so clever that it can hack anything, has innumerable social media trolls that influence elections and referendums around the world ("control the American mind"), drives a "fake news" campaign at a fraction of the cost but with far greater effectiveness than the massed legions of the Western media, is a threat to practically everything we hold sacred... but is too stupid to get it right. Possessing great and powerful secrets and a stunningly powerful machine to spread them, it chooses to fire a damp squib too late to make any difference and passes up the chance to have a compromised US president for it to control.

In other words, it"s nonsense: we don"t really need the forensics of VIPS; we don"t need to argue with people who say it"s fake news about Seth Rich, or that Assange is a Putinbot, or carefully ignore Murray. Those efforts are useful enough but they"re not necessary. In any case, the Russia story is a Gish gallop and a whole academy of wise men and women couldn"t keep up with the latest. (Robert Parry bravely attempts to list the most prominent ones from the Vermont power facility, through all 17 agencies to 14^th not 4^th.)

Just common sense will do it: if the Russians had wanted to bring Hillary Clinton down, they had far more powerful charges which they could have detonated much earlier. It is not plausible that all they had was the rigging evidence and that they then deployed it too late to have an effect.

Or, maybe they"re not so all-competent in which case all the other stuff we"ve had shoved down our throats for months about "Russian information warfare" is even bigger nonsense.

Mueller"s Top FBI Agent Probing Clinton Emails, Russian-Collusion "Removed" After Anti-Trump Texts Found

Special Counsel Robert Mueller"s top FBI investigator into "Russian meddling" and Clinton emails has been removed from the probe reportedly due to the discovery of anti-Trump text messages exchanged with a colleague (whom he happened to be having an extra-marital affair with).

FBI veteran, Peter Strzok, considered "one of the most experienced and trusted FBI counterintel investigators" according to the NYT, and who was tapped by Mueller to help lead the probe of Russian meddling in last year"s presidential election, after helping lead the investigation into whether Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information on her private email account, has left Mueller"s team.

Mueller removed a top F.B.I. agent from his investigation into Russian election meddling after the Justice Department’s inspector general began examining whether the agent sent text messages that expressed anti-Trump political views. https://t.co/Cdrlq6uwSy

— Michael S. Schmidt (@nytmike) December 2, 2017

As ABC reported in August, when Strzok"s departure was first noticed, this was the first known hitch in a secretive probe that, by all public accounts, is charging full steam ahead. ABC reported that it was unclear why Strzok stepped away from Mueller"s team of nearly two dozen lawyers, investigators and administrative staffers. Strzok, who had spent much of his law enforcement career working counterintelligence cases and has been unanimously praised by government officials who spoke with ABC News, was moved the FBI"s human resources division. The move prompted many questions about why one of the FBI"s top investigators was being reassigned.

We now know the answer: anonymous sources close to the matter told The Washington Post that Strzok was removed from the investigation after the Justice Department’s inspector general began examining whether the agent had sent text messages that expressed anti-Trump political views, three people briefed on the matter told the WaPo.

In a rare, on the record statement to the media, the Special Counsel"s office effectively admitted that the head investigator into both Clinton and Trump was tainted: "Immediately upon learning of the allegations, the Special Counsel’s Office removed Peter Strzok from the investigation."

More from the WaPo:

During the Clinton investigation, Strzok was involved in a romantic relationship with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who worked for Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

 

The extramarital affair was problematic, these people said, but of greater concern among senior law enforcement officials were text messagesthe two exchanged during the Clinton investigation and campaign season, in which they expressed anti-Trump sentiments and other comments that appeared to favor Clinton.

 

The people discussing the matter did not further describe the political messages between Strzok and Page, except to say the two would sometime react to campaign news of the moment.

 

Officials are now reviewing the communications to see if they show evidence of political bias in their work on the cases, a review which could result in a public report, according to people familiar with the matter.

At the time they left Mueller’s group, no one publicly linked the two departures. For months, officials have refused to explain why Strzok was reassigned, but people familiar with the matter said it was ultimately Mueller’s decision.

As WaPo concludes, the president’s most vociferous defenders in Congress have called for a special counsel to investigate how the FBI handled the Clinton probe, and other Clinton-connected matters. Word of the texts could give new fuel to those demands.

For those confused, what this means is that the "professional, impartial, objective" FBI agent tasked with not only uncovering fraud and/or problems with Hillary"s abuse of a personal email server and was then charged with finding dirt on Donald Trump in his "Russian collusion", was himself a member of the "resistance."

No wonder Comey"s "recommendation" was to leave Hillary alone, while personally leaking his own, confidential data to the NYT in hopes of starting the Russia proble and ultimately getting Trump impeached.  One does wonder, however, just when will all this anti-Trump bias running across the FBI and CIA be noted, and when truly objective investigations finally take place.

Furthermore, we suspect Page and Strzok were not alone in their anti-Trumpedness, but we do note that the implicitly pro-Trump "leak" of these Mueller-probe-embarrassing details is a radical sea-change from the usual torrent of "gotcha" leaks emanating from the NSA/CIA/FBI designed to further the Deep State"s grip on the administration.

House Launches Probe Into Comey"s Handling Of Clinton Email Investigation

Much like Hillary"s former IT consultant Paul Combetta who admitted to deleting Hillary"s emails despite the existence of a Congressional subpoena, it seems as though James Comey has just had his very own "oh shit" moment.

After months of inexplicable delays, the chairman of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees,  Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), announced moments ago a joint investigation into how the Justice Department handled last year"s investigation into Hillary Clinton"s private email server. 

Among other things, Goodlatte and Gowdy said that the FBI must answer for why it chose to provide public updates in the Clinton investigation but not in the Trump investigation and why the FBI decided to "appropriate full decision making in respect to charging or not charging Secretary Clinton," a power typically left to the DOJ.

"Our justice system is represented by a blind-folded woman holding a set of scales. Those scales do not tip to the right or the left; they do not recognize wealth, power, or social status. The impartiality of our justice system is the bedrock of our republic and our fellow citizens must have confidence in its objectivity, independence, and evenhandedness. The law is the most equalizing force in this country. No entity or individual is exempt from oversight.

 

"Decisions made by the Department of Justice in 2016 have led to a host of outstanding questions that must be answered. These include, but are not limited to:

 

• FBI"s decision to publicly announce the investigation into Secretary Clinton"s handling of classified information but not to publicly announce the investigation into campaign associates of then-candidate Donald Trump;


• FBI"s decision to notify Congress by formal letter of the status of the investigation both in October and November of 2016;


• FBI"s decision to appropriate full decision making in respect to charging or not charging Secretary Clinton to the FBI rather than the DOJ;


• FBI"s timeline in respect to charging decisions.

 

"The Committees will review these decisions and others to better understand the reasoning behind how certain conclusions were drawn. Congress has a constitutional duty to preserve the integrity of our justice system by ensuring transparency and accountability of actions taken."

????#BREAKING: @RepGoodlatte & @TGowdySC to investigate #DOJ decisions made in 2016 to ensure transparency and accountability at the agency. pic.twitter.com/EOm4pnHbTG

— House Judiciary ? (@HouseJudiciary) October 24, 2017

Of course, this comes just one day after Comey revealed his secret Twitter account which led the internet to wildly speculate that he may be running for a political office...which, these days, being under investigation by multiple Congressional committees might just mean he has a good shot.

Finally, we leave you with one artist"s depiction of how the Comey "investigation" of Hillary"s email scandal played out...

 

Here is the full letter from Goodlatte and Gowdy:

Jared Kushner Reportedly Used Private Email For White House Business

As if the flow of news on this warm September weekend wasn’t hectic enough thanks to President Trump’s decision to pick a fight with professional sports, Politico is out with the latest bombshell report alleging some nefarious act was committed by one of Trump’s closest advisors, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Politico reports that, in an ironic twist, Kushner continued to use a private email account that had been set up during the transition to communicate with fellow administration officials during Trump’s first nine months in office, even as Trump continued to bash his former rival’s mishandling of classified information on a private server during her time at the State Department.

While Politico places the implication of wrongdoing front and center in its story, it waits until lower down to provide a key piece of context from the White House communications department: "Kushner sent less than 100 emails from this account, and those that were sent consisted mostly of quips about news items and minor commentary."

Liberals like to talk about the concept of false equivalence, especially in the context of how the media covered the Clinton email scandal vs. coverage of Trump’s more controversial pronouncements and business arrangements. That"s what this Kushner story appears to be. Judging by the description, it’s clear that Kushner didn’t rely on his private account to conduct public business, and only used it to send a handful of messages. More to the point, while he may have violated public-information guidelines, he did not improperly handle classified information.

“Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement Sunday. “Fewer than 100 emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account. These usually forwarded news articles or political commentary and most often occurred when someone initiated the exchange by sending an email to his personal rather than his White House address.”

Politico also noted that Kushner’s use of a private email account was part of a larger pattern of Trump administration aides using personal email accounts for government business. Kushner allegedly used the private account to communicate with Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn and Josh Raffel.

Aides who have exchanged emails with Kushner on his private account since President Donald Trump took office in January include former chief of staff Reince Priebus, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, and spokesman Josh Raffel, according to emails described to or shown to POLITICO. In some cases, those White House officials have emailed Kushner’s account first, said people familiar with the messages.

…and then there’s this, six paragraphs in.

There is no indication that Kushner has shared any sensitive or classified material on his private account, or that he relies on his private email account more than his official White House account to conduct government business. Aides say he prefers to call or text over using email.

And that"s not even the most glaring example of Politico"s tendency to leave key details that detract from the impression of wrongdoing until much later in the story.

Even further down, Politico admits that Kushner’s conduct may not violate the Presidential Records Act...

Private email traffic among White House aides — some of it sent between personal email accounts rather than to or from government addresses — could skirt the requirements of the Presidential Records Act, which requires all documents related to the president’s personal and political activities to be archived. Trump himself is not known to use email but occasionally has email messages to his assistant printed and presented to him.

…And, furthermore, that it couldn’t verify whether Kushner forwarded all work-related emails to his work account, which would render his behavior 100% legitimate. The White House is insisting he remained in compliance, and Politico hasn’t uncovered any evidence to discredit this claim.

Lowell said Kushner has adhered to government record-keeping requirements by forwarding all the emails to his account, though POLITICO could not verify that.

Other White House officials have also sometimes used personal accounts to correspond with Kushner and with each other, according to emails seen by POLITICO and people familiar with Kushner’s correspondence. They have also used encrypted apps like Signal and Confide that automatically delete messages, prompting former press secretary Sean Spicer in February to issue a warning to communications staffers that using such apps could violate the Presidential Records Act.

Politico then adds that private-email use in the Trump administration has been “somewhat common” despite Trump’s attacks on Clinton.

The use of personal email accounts in the Trump White House has been somewhat common, even though the president has been a harsh critic of Clinton’s private email habits, frequently leading “lock her up” chants as he traveled across the country on the campaign trail.

Politico also says Kushner and Ivanka Trump set up their private family domain late last year before moving to Washington from New York, according to people with knowledge of events as well as publicly available internet registration records. At the time, Kushner, who served as a senior campaign adviser, was expected to be named to a White House role, while Ivanka Trump was publicly saying she didn’t plan to work in her father’s administration, though she ended up taking an unpaid role with an office in the West Wing. People familiar with the account say it was primarily set up for personal use, but that Kushner has used it to communicate with acquaintances outside the White House about matters relating to Trump and the administration, according to people who have received messages.

Ivanka has an email account on the same domain, but there’s no indication she used her account for work purposes.

So is Kushner"s sending of work-related notes from his private email account a major violation on par with Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information? Or just another mainstream attack on Kushner, meant to dilute the Hillary Clinton email narrative?

Judge Orders New Search Of State Department Servers For Hillary"s Benghazi Emails

In March 2015, Judicial Watch filed a FOIA lawsuit seeking the following:

"Any and all e-mails of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Secretary Clinton concerning, regarding, or relating to the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya."

Ironically, State Department officials at the time decided to search records voluntarily turned over by Hillary and some of her former aides from private servers, as well as records collected by the FBI during their investigations, but figured it wasn"t necessary to search the one place where all official communications on such a topic should have been housed from the beginning: State Department servers.

For whatever reason, State has continually refused to conduct the search of its taxpayer funded servers going on two and a half years now.  Luckily, some small bit of rational thought prevailed yesterday when a U.S. District Judge filed an order demanding a search of State Department records for any and all Benghazi-related emails be completed by September 22, 2017.  Here is more from Politico:

"To date, State has searched only data compilations originating from outside sources — Secretary Clinton, her former aides, and the FBI. ... It has not, however, searched the one records system over which it has always had control and that is almost certain to contain some responsive records: the state.gov e-mail server," Mehta wrote.

 

"If Secretary Clinton sent an e-mail about Benghazi to Abedin, Mills, or Sullivan at his or her state.gov e-mail address, or if one of them sent an e-mail to Secretary Clinton using his or her state.gov account, then State’s server presumably would have captured and stored such an e-mail. Therefore, State has an obligation to search its own server for responsive records."

 

Justice Department lawyers representing State argued that making them search other employees" accounts for Clinton"s emails would set a bad precedent that would belabor other FOIA searches.

 

But Mehta said the circumstances surrounding Clinton"s email represented "a specific fact pattern unlikely to arise in the future."

 

Of course, this all feels eerily similar to another FOIA request we wrote about recently (see: FOIA Dump Reveals Collusion Between Lynch, FBI And Media To Bury Bill Clinton Meeting), in which the Obama administration told the American Center for Law and Justice there were no records of communications between the FBI and DOJ related to Loretta Lynch"s now infamous tarmac meeting with former President Bill Clinton.  That said, Jeff Sessions" DOJ ran the same search on behalf of the ACLJ and found dozens of FBI/DOJ exchanges on the topic...so weird, right?

But, according to a new DOJ FOIA dump just released by the American Center for Law and Justice

(ACLJ), it looks increasingly as if nothing reported about this "social meeting" between Lynch and Clinton was grounded in fact...shocking, we know.

 

First, the new FOIA documents seemingly confirm that the FBI and DOJ simply lied in response to the ACLJ"s initial FOIA request filed back in July 2016.  Here is what the ACLJ was told at the time after sending requests to both the Comey FBI and the Lynch DOJ asking for any documents related to the Clinton-Lynch plane meeting:

 

 

 

That said, documents released today by the ACLJ reveal several emails between FBI and DOJ officials concerning the Lynch/Clinton meeting primarily related to how they should go about explaining the train wreck that had just been unwittingly played out on live television courtesy of a local Phoenix affiliate station.

Given that, what are the chances that Tillerson"s State Department is suddenly able to "find" records that Hillary"s folks searched and searched for but were just never able to track down?  We would say pretty good...unless Hillary managed to wipe them...you know, "like with a cloth".

 

The full court order can be read here:

FBI Turns Over 7,000 Emails From Weiner's Laptop In Clinton Case

The event which according to many democrats cost Hillary Clinton the election (aside from Putin personally hacking the brains of several million middle-class Americans and forcing them to vote against Hillary, of course) is finally getting closure. On Thursday, the FBI turned over 7,000 new documents from Anthony Weiner’s private laptop to the State Department as part of a Judicial Watch"s freedom of information act lawsuit related to last year"s Hillary Clinton email case.

On Thursday, conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch and State Department representatives appeared in federal court in Washington, D.C., over the group"s FOIA suit seeking Clinton emails from her tenure at the State Department. During the hearing it was revealed that 7,000 new documents were turned over from Weiner"s notebook computer, the same computer which prompted James Comey to restart the FBI probe shortly before last year"s presidential election. The stack of emails is also expected to contain some emails sent by Weiner’s estranged wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

Speaking to Fox News, Judicial Watch President Tom said that they expect to begin receiving those documents in three months, once the State Department determines whether the Weiner documents are government or personal records. Last November, the State Department was ordered to turn over 500 pages of Clinton-related documents a month to Judicial Watch.

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

Fitton, expressed his displeasure with the speed of the process, especially now that another 7,000 documents are being added to the pile. Based on the 500-page-per-month rate, Fitton does not expect to receive the Weiner laptop documents in full for more than a year “at best.”

“This pushes this out until 2020 and beyond,” Fitton told Fox News after the hearing Thursday. “Production is slow because the legal counsel is a holdover from the Obama administration—the folks that are responsible for slow-rolling this are still here.” State Department attorneys blamed the slow “drip” of documents on a lack of resources due to President Trump’s federal hiring freeze and a supposedly “diminished public interest” in the Clinton email case since November. It was unclear if said interest was said to be replaced with heightened public interest in the NSA"s leaks of emails from those in Trump"s closest circle.

“I can’t imagine the Trump White House is not interested in Clinton emails,” Fitton said. “Six months into the Trump administration and their lawyers are defending Hillary Clinton and the misconduct of the Obama administration.”

Judicial Watch has been seeking emails from Weiner"s laptop to find out whether Abedin was sharing sensitive government information on another non-government device. The sharing of such information was at the heart of the Clinton email investigation, after it emerged she used a personal server for government business while secretary of state.  The unexpected discovery of related emails on the computer of Weiner led James Comey to briefly reopen the FBI"s case. Two months ago, Weiner pleaded guilty in connection with a sexting case.

Loretta Lynch Plot Thickens As New Details Emerge Of Her Dealings With The Hillary Campaign

Last night we asked a very simple question about why the DNC has failed to cooperate with Russia investigators by handing over their infamous email server to either the FBI or Robert Mueller"s team (see: DNC Server: Most Critical Evidence To Proving "Russian Hacking" Is Being Withheld From Mueller, Why?).  Afterall, if Russia did "hack the election", as we"ve been told 24/7 by CNN going on 8 months now, then the evidence could very well be on that server.  Which prompted us to ask this very simple question:

All of which brings us back to our original question: If the DNC is in possession of actual tangible evidence that could prove once and for all that Russians hacked their servers and attempted to undermine the campaign of Hillary Clinton, why not share that evidence with investigators and enjoy the blissful vindication that its public release would provide?

We concluded by wondering whether the stonewalling from the DNC just might have something to do with this "purely coincidental" meeting between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton on a tarmac in Phoenix and/or Loretta Lynch"s "assurances" to members of the Clinton campaign that the FBI"s investigation (or, "matter" if you prefer) of Hillary Clinton "wouldn"t go too far"?  Afterall, if evidence of "Russian hacking" were on that server, so to would there be evidence of Lynch"s transgressions...if they existed, of course.

But we"re not the only ones wondering whether there"s more to the Lynch story.  According to an article in the New York Post, some testimony that Lynch offered under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year could come back to haunt her.  In that testimony, Lynch said that she had "not spoken to anyone on either the campaign or transition or any staff members affiliated with them."

That said, and as we"ve reported before, that statement seems to contradict reports that Lynch personally assured members of Clinton"s campaign, potentially Amanda Renteria, that the FBI"s investigation "wouldn"t go too far"...more from the Post:

When former Attorney General Loretta Lynch testified last year about her decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information, she swore she never talked to “anyone” on the Clinton campaign. That categorical denial, though made in response to a series of questions about whether she spoke with Clintonworld about remaining attorney general if Hillary won the election, could come back to haunt her.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which has launched a bipartisan investigation into Lynch for possible obstruction of justice, recently learned of the existence of a document indicating Lynch assured the political director of Clinton’s campaign she wouldn’t let FBI agents “go too far” in probing the former secretary of state.

Lynch’s lawyer says she is cooperating with committee investigators, who are seeking answers to several questions, as well as relevant documents. Among other things, they want to know if she or any of her Justice Department staff “ever communicated with Amanda Renteria,” who headed Clinton’s political operations during the campaign. Renteria, who has been identified in the document as the senior Clinton campaign aide with whom Lynch privately communicated, has also been asked to testify.

And then there is that inconvenient Comey testimony in which the former FBI director says that he was instructed by Lynch to refer to the Clinton investigation as a "matter" rather than what it actually was, an investigation. 

Now, as The Post points out, there are new developments which would suggest that Comey confronted Lynch about the alleged communication with Amanda Renteria and promptly asked to leave.

And it will press her to explain the discrepancy — along with why she reportedly asked former FBI Director James Comey to leave her office when he confronted her with the document.

And then there is that meeting with Bill Clinton on that Phoenix tarmac that just happened to get noticed by a local reporter who just happened to be on scene.

After all the drama around the Clinton email investigation, which included multiple people being offered immunity and the revelation of what appeared to be numerous federal crimes committed by several people on Clinton"s staff, wouldn"t it be ironic if Obama"s Attorney General were the only one to take the fall?  Scandal free administration indeed...

Comey Friend Unveils "Smoking Gun" Story

For about a week now, Benjamin Wittes, the Brookings Institution senior fellow and noted ally of former FBI Director James Comey, has been taunting the Trump administration with tweets suggesting that another "bombshell" story, presumably related to the Russia investigation, was in the works and set to drop any minute (we covered it all here: "Tick, Tick, Tick" Comey Ally Scrambles To Explain Why "Next Trump Bombshell" Didn"t Arrive Today). 

Of course, people took notice of the warnings because Wittes posted similar tweets just before the New York Times published their now infamous story on Comey"s memos.

TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK pic.twitter.com/yuL0o0TBbT

— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) June 23, 2017

So what was the "bombshell" story?  It seems to have come in the form of a rather bizarre, and thoroughly difficult to follow, Wall Street Journal article entitled "GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn."

To summarize the "bombshell", the story is about a long-time Republican opposition researcher, 81-year-old Peter W. Smith, who apparently set out on a mission to find Hillary"s 30,000 emails which the FBI confirmed had gone missing.  In his efforts to find those emails, he scoured hacking chat rooms looking for clues and/or hackers that might be able to help him.  The WSJ alleges that Smith may or may not have been working with Michael Flynn but, in the end, they found absolutely nothing.  To summarize even further, a guy tried to find Hillary"s missing emails and failed...HALT THE PRESSES!

Of course, the goal of the story is to paint some sinister plot that involved Smith and Michael Flynn enlisting the help of some Russians to hack the 2016 election...thus "proving" the collusion angle. 

Unfortunately, the story seems to prove the exact opposite which is, if Flynn was really running around on some wild goose chase looking for Hillary"s missing 30,000 emails by chatting up hackers on a message board then we have to assume that means he wasn"t in any way connected to the original hack which ended up on WikiLeaks.

In any event, here is the Wall Street Journal"s take:

Before the 2016 presidential election, a longtime Republican opposition researcher mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers.

In conversations with members of his circle and with others he tried to recruit to help him, the GOP operative, Peter W. Smith, implied he was working with retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, at the time a senior adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump.

“He said, ‘I’m talking to Michael Flynn about this—if you find anything, can you let me know?’” said Eric York, a computer-security expert from Atlanta who searched hacker forums on Mr. Smith’s behalf for people who might have access to the emails.

Emails written by Mr. Smith and one of his associates show that his small group considered Mr. Flynn and his consulting company, Flynn Intel Group, to be allies in their quest.

Of course, it"s only deeper in the story that the WSJ admits they have no idea if Flynn was even involved with Smith...but no one reads an entire article so it"s fairly irrelevant.

What role, if any, Mr. Flynn may have played in Mr. Smith’s project is unclear. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Smith said he knew Mr. Flynn, but he never stated that Mr. Flynn was involved.

And another irrelevant detail from the WSJ:

Mr. Smith said he worked independently and wasn’t part of the Trump campaign.

Finally, Smith apparently started his search for Hillary"s emails over the Labor Day Weekend in 2016.  His efforts to scour hacker forums ultimately yielded 5 groups who claimed to have the missing emails, 2 of which were Russian.  However, Smith seemingly doubted the authenticity of the intelligence he received and, as a result, never leaked their contents.

His project began over Labor Day weekend 2016 when Mr. Smith, a private-equity executive from Chicago active in Republican politics, said he assembled a group of technology experts, lawyers and a Russian-speaking investigator based in Europe to acquire emails the group theorized might have been stolen from the private server Mrs. Clinton used as secretary of state.

In the interview with the Journal, Mr. Smith said he and his colleagues found five groups of hackers who claimed to possess Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails, including two groups he determined were Russians.

Mr. Smith said after vetting batches of emails offered to him by hacker groups last fall, he couldn’t be sure enough of their authenticity to leak them himself. “We told all the groups to give them to WikiLeaks,” he said. WikiLeaks has never published those emails or claimed to have them.

Meanwhile, the WSJ confirms that Smith died last month at the age of 81.

So there you have it...all the makings of another salacious, "bombshell" story with multiple references to Russians, hackers, collusion, shady dealings with Michael Flynn, etc, etc, etc....yet still no evidence of pretty much anything.

Weiner Wept: Disgraced Dem "Wept Openly" As He Plead Guilty To Sexting A Minor; "I Have A Sickness"

Disgraced former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner reportedly wept openly in federal court Friday as he pleaded guilty to sexting a 15-year-old girl and admitted to the judge: "I have a sickness, but I do not have an excuse."

Per NBC, Weiner took questions from the judge at his hearing before reading a prepared statement which included the following:

"Through approximately March 2016, I engaged in obscene communications with this teenager, including sharing explicit images and encouraging her to engage in sexually explicit conduct, just as I had done and continued to do with adult women.  I knew this was as morally wrong as it was unlawful."

He said that last fall he "came to grips for the first time with the depths of my sickness. I had hit bottom," and entered "intensive treatment." He then apologized to the girl.

As part of his plea deal with the United States attorney’s office, Weiner will have to register as a sex offender.

* * *

From earlier:

After years of sexting scandals that cost him his marriage with Huma Abedin and potentially even cost Hillary the White House, disgraced former Democratic congressman and New York Mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner is set to appear in a federal courtroom in Manhattan today to enter a guilty plea for sexting with a minor.

According to the New York Times, Weiner will plead guilty to a single charge of transferring obscene material to a minor, pursuant to a plea agreement he struck with the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan. Weiner reportedly surrendered to the F.B.I. early Friday morning.

As a result of the guilty plea, Weiner will likely end up as a registered sex offender, although a final determination on that issue has yet to be made.  The charge carries a potential sentence of between 0 - 10 years in prison, meaning Weiner could avoid prison time though the ultimate sentence will be determined by a judge.

As you"ll recall, the FBI only discovered those last minute Hillary emails due to their ongoing criminal investigation of Anthony Weiner.  The "tens of thousands of emails", many including exchanges between Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton, discovered on Weiner"s computer ultimately prompted James Comey to make his now infamous October 29th announcement that the Hillary email investigation had been re-opened.  Hillary has since attributed her loss to Comey"s decision.

Of course, as you may recall, Weiner"s latest sexting scandal came to light back in September 2016, a very critical time for the Hillary campaign, when it was exposed by the Daily Mail.  Unfortunately, this time the scandal involved a girl that Weiner knew to be a 15-year old Sophomore in high school.  But, that didn"t seem to stop him from telling the teenager that he would like to "bust that tight pussy so hard." 

Anthony Weiner"s latest alleged scandal involves a 15-year-old high school student

The girl first reached out to Weiner in January 2016.  In that initial discussion, the girl openly admitted that she was a high school student. 

But, that didn"t seem to stop Weiner from later telling the girl over a sexting app that he "would bust that tight pu**y so hard and so often that you would be limp for a week."

In an interview with the Daily Mail, the high school student said that Weiner pushed her to "dress up in school-girl outfits" and engage in "rape fantasies" over skype.  He also felt the need to inform the young girl that he and his wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin, hadn"t had sex in a year.

"When we would Skype, he would tell me that he was very lonely and that it had been a year since he and his wife [Huma] had sex, and that she really didn"t pay him any attention.  We would talk, just chatting for about 30 minutes and it would lead to more sexual things…asking me to undress…he"d comment on my body. He asked me about masturbation, and that kind of thing."

"He would pretend like he was a teacher and I was a student. And he"d talk about me sitting in the front of his class, and him taking me after school."

"He had some rape fantasies. It would just be him showing up at my house when my dad was out of town.  And just start undressing me, being forceful, asking me if I want to be dominated, strange questions."

She said when she told him she was uncomfortable with this, he quickly agreed to change the subject.

The girl said she started feeling guilty about hiding the relationship, and told her father and a teacher about it in late April.

After ruining her shot at the White House, you had to know that Hillary wouldn"t let Weiner escape this one.

Trump: If The DOJ Wants To Arrest Assange, "It's OK With Me"

Having selected several key excerpts from Donald Trump"s lengthy AP interview earlier, we urge readers looking for fascinating yet surreal bedtime reading to give the full, nearly 8,000 word transcript a try, as it contains bizarro excerpts such as this:

AP: You did put out though, as a candidate, you put out a 100-day plan. Do you feel like you should be held accountable to that plan?

TRUMP: Somebody, yeah, somebody put out the concept of a hundred-day plan. But yeah. Well, I"m mostly there on most items. Go over the items, and I"ll talk to you ... (Crosstalk.)

TRUMP: But things change. There has to be flexibility. Let me give you an example. President Xi, we have a, like, a really great relationship. For me to call him a currency manipulator and then say, "By the way, I"d like you to solve the North Korean problem," doesn"t work. So you have to have a certain flexibility, Number One. Number Two, from the time I took office till now, you know, it"s a very exact thing. It"s not like generalities. Do you want a Coke or anything?

AP: I"m OK, thank you. No. ...

Yet what caught our attention was the following excerpt on a topic that has re-emerged in recent days in the aftermath of the spat between Julian Assange and the new CIA chief Mike Pompeo, who last week made it clear Assange"s days as a quasi-free man are numbered. And, as the following exchange between the AP and Trump notes, the president does not harbor any partcularly fond feelings for the man who has been accused of being a Russian plant or spy and crushing Hillary Clinton"s election chances. That, and so much more in the following bizarre exchange:

AP: Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States?

TRUMP: When Wikileaks came out ... never heard of Wikileaks, never heard of it. When Wikileaks came out, all I was just saying is, "Well, look at all this information here, this is pretty good stuff." You know, they tried to hack the Republican, the RNC, but we had good defenses. They didn"t have defenses, which is pretty bad management. But we had good defenses, they tried to hack both of them. They weren"t able to get through to Republicans. No, I found it very interesting when I read this stuff and I said, "Wow." It was just a figure of speech. I said, "Well, look at this. It"s good reading."

AP: But that didn"t mean that you supported what Assange is doing?

TRUMP: No, I don"t support or unsupport. It was just information. They shouldn"t have allowed it to get out. If they had the proper defensive devices on their internet, you know, equipment, they wouldn"t even allow the FBI. How about this — they get hacked, and the FBI goes to see them, and they won"t let the FBI see their server. But do you understand, nobody ever writes it. Why wouldn"t (former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John) Podesta and Hillary Clinton allow the FBI to see the server? They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based.

AP: CrowdStrike? 

TRUMP: That"s what I heard. I heard it"s owned by a very rich Ukrainian, that"s what I heard. But they brought in another company to investigate the server. Why didn"t they allow the FBI in to investigate the server? I mean, there is so many things that nobody writes about. It"s incredible. 

AP: Can I just ask you, though — do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to arrest Julian Assange? 

TRUMP: I am not involved in that decision, but if Jeff Sessions wants to do it, it"s OK with me. I didn"t know about that decision, but if they want to do it, it"s OK with me.

And while Trump may somehow not know about the DOJ"s decision to arrest Assange, we are confident he knows that any potential pardon of Assange is long gone. As for Donald Trump "loving" Wikileaks, that was so six months ago.