Paul Manafort's crimes: 1. HE'S RICH!!!! 2. HE DOESN'T PAY HIS "FAIR SHARE" OF TAXES!!!!
And that's about it...
"The trial of President Donald Trump's onetime campaign chairman will open this week with tales of lavish spending, secret shell companies and millions of dollars of Ukrainian money flowing through offshore bank accounts and into the political consultant's pocket.
"What's likely to be missing are answers about whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential election, or really any mention of Russia at all.
"Paul Manafort's financial crimes trial, the first arising from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, will center on his Ukrainian consulting work and only briefly touch on his involvement with the president's campaign."
The article should be entitled "FISA documents reveal FBI collusion with the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign".
The entire "Russian Collusion" story was sham from the second it was uttered, but as the "investigation" continues, there are many who are investigating the investigation, and what they are finding is truly shocking:
Our media’s valiant efforts to distract us notwithstanding, information continues to seep out that underscores how badly a housecleaning is needed in Washington, D.C. Last week saw the release of the applications used to obtain warrants from the FISA court to spy on Carter Page, an adviser to the Trump presidential campaign. Obtained by Judicial Watch, the 400-plus pages of (heavily redacted) documents support the conclusions earlier drawn by the House Intelligence Committee (and denounced by Democrats as hysteria): the FISA warrants were obtained through obfuscation and deceit. As various commentators predicted would be proven, the bulk of the information that formed the basis for the FISA warrant applications was the “dossier” of allegations about Donald Trump’s activities in Russia. This dossier was provided to the FBI by British spy Christopher Steele. Steele was hired during the 2016 presidential campaign by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, who was paid by Hillary Clinton’s law firm Perkins Coie, who was paid by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. The allegations were scandalous and completely unverified, in violation of federal statutes and FISA court rules. In other words, the FBI used oppo research paid for by the Democrats as justification for government spying on a political opponent and other Americans.
Count One alleges a criminal conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States through cyber operations by the GRU that involved the staged release of stolen documents for the purpose of interfering with the 2016 president election;
Counts Two through Nine charge aggravated identity theft for using identification belonging to eight victims to further their computer fraud scheme;
Count Ten alleges a conspiracy to launder money in which the defendants laundered the equivalent of more than $95,000 by transferring the money that they used to purchase servers and to fund other costs related to their hacking activities through cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin; and
Count Eleven charges conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States by attempting to hack into the computers of state boards of elections, secretaries of state, and US companies that supplied software and other technology related to the administration of elections.
4. Here is an interesting bit of text on the very bottom of the press release about this indictment from the Department of Justice:
There is no allegation in the indictment that any American was a knowing participant in the alleged unlawful activity or knew they were communicating with Russian intelligence officers. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the vote count or changed the outcome of the 2016 election.
So what's going on here? Trump knew all about these Russian hackers sometime ago, and knew it would look bad, but that ultimately, there would be NO EVIDENCE of collusion. The fact that this announcement was timed for TODAY, Friday, July 13, 2018 is very interesting, as Trump will be meeting with Putin on July 16.
So while Trump backers might be moaning and wailing that this was timed to make Trump look bad, the truth is that he knew about this well in advance, and that this announcement was made TODAY, in advance of the meeting with Putin, to send Putin a message.
5. There is more to come from this story, and while it seemingly looks bad for Trump, there is more to this story than we know. It is interesting that in looking at the timeline for these hackers, most of their work was done between April and June of 2018. Obama ordered the "stand down" of the National Security Council in their efforts to counter Russian hacking in August of 2018, after these attacks became known.
So why order a "stand down" of cybersecurity aimed directly against Russian hacking when you know full well that Russian hackers are attacking your servers? Something doesn't make sense here. Logic dictates that efforts against hacking should become even more vigorous once you know an attack has occurred, not lessened...
One possible answer: perhaps the Obama administration was wanting these hackers to continue working unhindered for some odd reason. For instance, to serve as later "proof" of collusion with Donald Trump.
How Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were conspiring with federal judges in regards to the Russian collusion investigation:
Newly discovered text messages obtained by The Federalist reveal two key federal law enforcement officials conspired to meet with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judge who presided over the federal case against Michael Flynn. The judge, Rudolph Contreras, was recused from handling the case just days after accepting the guilty plea of President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser who was charged with making false statements to federal investigators.
The text messages about Contreras between controversial Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) lawyer Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the senior FBI counterintelligence official who was kicked off Robert Mueller’s special counsel team, were deliberately hidden from Congress, multiple congressional investigators told The Federalist. In the messages, Page and Strzok, who are rumored to have been engaged in an illicit romantic affair, discussed Strzok’s personal friendship with Contreras and how to leverage that relationship in ongoing counterintelligence matters.
Some interesting information about the Steele dossier, the famous document that started the entire Donald Trump / Russia collusion investigation:
Like dandelions in an untreated lawn, the now infamous Russian dossier apparently multiplied in numbers — and emissaries delivering it to the FBI — the closer Donald Trump got to the White House.
We know from public testimony that dossier author and former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele shared his findings with the FBI in summer and fall 2016 before he was terminated as a confidential source for inappropriate media contacts.
And we learned that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) provided a copy to the FBI after the November 2016 election — out of a sense of duty, his office says.
Now, memos the FBI is turning over to Congress show the bureau possessed at least three versions of the dossier and its mostly unverified allegations of collusion.
Each arrived from a different messenger: McCain, Mother Jones reporter David Corn, Fusion GPS founder (and Steele boss) Glenn Simpson.
That revelation is in an email that disgraced FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok wrote to FBI executives around the time BuzzFeed published a version of the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017.
“Our internal system is blocking the site,” Strzok wrote of the document posted on BuzzFeed. “I have the PDF via iPhone but it’s 25.6MB. Comparing now. The set is only identical to what McCain had. (it has differences from what was given to us by Corn and Simpson.)”
FBI agent Peter Strzok, for the first time ever in public, admits that the Steel dossier, which is the ONLY evidence that the FBI had to start the Russia collusion investigation, came from Bruce Ohr, in the Department of Justice.
Why is this significant? Because Bruce Ohr's wife worked for Fusion GPS. And we know, for a fact, that Fusion GPS came up with the Steele dossier as "campaign dirt" to be used against Donald Trump in the election. The payments from Clinton's campaign to Fusion GPS for this opposition research are a matter of public record.
Of course, digging dirt on a political opponent is not evidence of wrong doing by that opponent...it's just a political strategy to find ways to paint your opponent as a scumbag, using means that would almost never, ever pass muster in a court of law.
So we have the following chain of events:
1. The Clinton campaign pays off Fusion GPS to dig up "dirt" on Donald Trump, and they come up with a document now know as "the Steele dossier" which was named after the former British intelligence operative who provided the dirt.
2. Nellie Ohr, who works for Fusion GPS, passes the Steele dossier to her husband Bruce Ohr, who works in the Obama Department of Justice.
3. Bruce Ohr passes the Steele dossier to the FBI, and most likely directly to Peter Strzok, though he denies he received it personally. But he does admit that "the FBI" did receive it from Bruce Ohr.
4. Armed with nothing more than campaign dirt funded by the Clinton campaign, Peter Strzok opens up the now famous "Russia collusion" investigation into Donald Trump.
Does that seem a little fishy to you? How often does the FBI open up criminal investigations based on PAID campaign opposition research as it's ONLY source of evidence? Never, of course, but that is, in fact what happened. Those of you who know how the Democrats have controlled the city of Chicago for decades on end know full well how they operate, and, of course, both Hillary and Obama are Chicago Democrats with extremely close ties to the machine, especially Obama.
So what is really going on here? Let me give you the following scenario for your consideration, every single one of these points is extremely well documented, with many published articles or Congressional hearing testimony to back them up:
1. Hillary Clinton pays Fusion GPS to come up with a dossier on Donald Trump that links him to Putin's attempt to interfere with the American elections.
2. The dirt that is dug up is all done by a former British MI6 agent by the name of Christopher Steele.
3. Steele gets paid for his work, and hands his dossier to Fusion GPS and they provide it to both the Hillary Campaign, and the Obama Department of Justice.
4. The Department of Justice hands it off to FBI Agent Peter Strzok, who then uses the campaign dirt as "evidence" that Donald Trump is colluding with the Russian government to overthrow the election, and opens a secret investigation.
5. Because now Donald Trump is now labeled a threat to national security, the FULL WEIGHT OF ALL GOVERNMENT RESOURCES, FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC, are used to "investigate" the Trump campaign, including wire taps, spying, electronic surveillance, and other spy-craft. Of course, they are also going to hear a lot about campaign strategy too in all these intercepts, which of course is what they are really after. Think Watergate, but with the ENTIRE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT being used as the means to spy on the campaign. In other words, something that is one thousand times worse than Watergate.
6. But, because Donald Trump is a "threat" to national security, we not only use American government resources, but now also employ the resources of our allies to spy on the Trump campaign, especially those of Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Again, all this is well documented and in the public record.
7. The entire idea behind this secret Russia collusion investigation was never to prove that Donald Trump really did collude with the Russians, a charge so incredibly ridiculous it's hard to understand how any grown adult can believe in it, but rather this was just an effort to infiltrate his presidential campaign, find out his strategies and plans, and get that information to Clinton and Obama to be used to destroy the Trump candidacy.
8. Hillary Clinton, with tremendous help from the "Russian collusion" investigation then becomes president of the United States, and the "investigation" gets shut down, remaining a dirty little secret, and we never, ever hear about any of this.
But something funny happened on the way to Hillary becoming president: she lost, despite the deck being stacked in her favor, and in the anger and frustration of losing, she blows the lid on the secret "Russian collusion" investigation, making it now public. That was a very bad mistake on her part, as now we are finding out just how very dirty her campaign and the Obama administration really was. We are also finding that Peter Strzok, the lead FBI investigator, and the man who personally began the Russian collusion investigation, is an extremely loyal and even fanatical supporter of Hillary Clinton and Obama. The same is true of Peter Strzok's girlfriend, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who was in on the conspiracy from the very beginning. As a matter of fact, it was the personal communications between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page that are now showing the Russia collusion investigation to be nothing more than "an insurance policy" to be used to make sure Trump never won the election.
We are only looking at the very tip of the iceberg here, the depth and the breadth of this corrupt use of government resources for partisan political purposes has yet to be fully revealed, but make no mistake about it, since Obama and Hillary made good use of our allies intelligence gathering ability as part of their "opposition research", we have what could easily become a case for high treason.
Now of course, this only my interpretation of events from all the public sourced documents, interviews I could find...none of this is "conspiracy theory" stuff, it's all quite real. The proof of this is how FIERCELY the Democrats are protecting the scumbag FBI Agent Peter Strzok, who is well hated by a majority of the regular "rank and file" FBI agents. All the Democrats in Congrees know full well what was happening here, and they are doing everything they can to prevent the truth from getting out. This might finally be the one thing that truly destroys the Democrat Party, something that should have taken place back in the 1860's, but never happened.
What's going on here is very interesting: Trey Gowdy is asking some very general questions about the Russia investigation, in terms of how it originated. But Peter Strzok refuses to answer the question, stating that the FBI will not allow him to answer, which is complete nonsense. Trey Gowdy is an EXTREMELY accomplished prosecutor, and is trying to find out the truth about the Russia collusion allegations, but Peter Strzok, with the tremendous help of the Democrats in the chamber, are doing EVERYTHING THEY CAN to prevent an answer to be given.
Here's a very important question to ask yourself: Why would would the Democrats not want ANY information about the origin of the Russia collusion investigation to be known?
The question of the number of people interviewed is not going to cause any problems to the investigation, unless, of course, the answer to that question is ZERO.
I guarantee that Trey Gowdy knows, for a fact, that the answer, is ZERO. Good prosecutors always know the exact answer to these questions before they ask them, and he's giving Strzok the opportunity to come clean. The TREMENDOUS amount of obstruction on display here is to make sure that the answer of "ZERO" is never heard.
The point being, that Peter Strzok, who is the ORIGINATOR of the Russia collusion investigation, never had any evidence, nor any basis in fact, for opening the investigation to begin with. A good prosecutor always has a series of interviews and a big pile of evidence handy before an official investigation is begun. Otherwise, the FBI (or any other police agency) could have official investigations into just about anything they wanted to, whether or not there's a hint of evidence for their meddling. Investigations without any basis of wrongdoing are known as "fishing expeditions".
