[DS] Pushes Same Hacking Tactic, The Coverup Already Failed – Episode 2070

• 1.
• The media pushed glowing accounts of FBI source Christopher Steele, portraying him as a top MI6 Russian spy, the man behind the dismantling of the international soccer FIFA bribery conspiracy, and a long-time reliable source for U.S. intelligence agencies. The IG report revealed the press accounts greatly embellished the dossier author’s resume and that the Crossfire Hurricane team regurgitated the press’ puffery to the FISA court.
• 2.
• Another media myth the IG report revealed the FBI and DOJ believed concerns Republicans’ role in the Steele dossier. There was none, but the press’s careless reporting quickly conflated a previous Republican contract with Fusion GPS to perform general opposition research on Donald Trump—which did not involve Steele or a focus on Russia—with Fusion GPS’s hiring of Steele in June 2016 on behalf of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
• The DNC/Clinton contract was specifically to “obtain information about whether Russia was trying to achieve a particular outcome in the 2016 U.S. elections, what personal and business ties then candidate Trump had in Russia, and whether there were any ties between the Russian government and Trump or his campaign.”
• This distinction matters, because if Republicans had previously hired Steele, that fact would counter claims Steele held a pro-Democrat bias that influenced his reporting. Also, by conflating the two separate contracts, it creates the appearance that Trump’s Republican opponents were pushing the Russia collusion hoax before Hillary got involved. But neither is true.
• 3.
• A third time the FBI fell for the media spin concerned former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page’s supposed involvement in massaging the Republican Party platform concerning Ukraine. According to the IG’s report, “all of the Carter Page FISA applications alleged that Page participated in drafting the RNC’s platform change on providing lethal assistance to Ukraine. The FISA applications alleged that the platform change on Ukraine would not include a provision to provide weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, controverting Republican Party policy.”
• Again, this allegation followed the conventional wisdom but was wrong, in two respects. First, the Republican Party platform never called for providing “weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces.” Rather, as reporter Byron York detailed, the draft platform read: “We will meet the return of Russian belligerence with the same resolve that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. We will not accept any territorial change in Eastern Europe imposed by force, in Ukraine or elsewhere, and will use all appropriate measures to bring to justice the practitioners of aggression and assassination.”
•  the FISA secret surveillance applications all painted Page as responsible for changing the platform, just as the media had. Plus, the FBI did more than merely believe the press’s narrative—they cited the fake news from “identified news organizations” in the FISA applications to bolster the charge that Page bore responsibility for weakening the platform.
• In fact, the FBI believed the media narrative about the platform change over the intel the bureau’s own CHS, Stefan Halper, had obtained: In an October 2, 2016, monitored conversation with Page, the Trump advisor told Halper, with regard the platform committee proceedings, that he had “stayed clear of that,” even though there were “a lot of conspiracy theories that I was one of them.” “In retrospect,” Page added in the secretly monitored conversation, “it’s way better off that I remained at arm’s length.”
• 4
• A fourth narrative that took hold with the Crossfire Hurricane team concerned Trump’s late-July joke, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
• Many in the press played Trump’s comments as “quite literally” an entreaty to Russia to hack Clinton’s emails. However, this narrative made no sense because “the 30,000 emails” were ones Clinton had deleted from her homebrewed server, so there was nothing to hack.
• Soon, however, the media narrative took on a life of its own, with the press and Democrat politicians painting Trump’s comments as concerning the DNC’s emails that were hacked and later released by WikiLeaks. The IG report now reveals that the FBI fell for the press and Democrat’s dissembling, as seen by the FBI’s misinterpretation of a comment Page made to Halper in August 2016.
• During that FBI-monitored meeting, Halper asked the Trump aide whether there was an “October Surprise” in the works. According to the IG report, “Page stated that there would be a ‘different October Surprise’ this year.” Page then shared what he called his own “conspiracy theory” about “the next email dump,” saying it would be the “33,000.”
• Anyone would have known then that a reference to “33,000” emails meant Clinton’s missing emails and not the DNC’s hacked emails. Yet, in the FISA application, “the FBI assessed that these statements, along with other evidence, indicated that Page was aware of the pending leak of DNC emails,” proving yet again that the FBI fell for the press’ propaganda.
• 5.  Russian Collusion

Source: thefederalist.com

BREAKING: Deep State Snake Mary McCord Goes from Setting Up General Flynn to Working for Adam Schiff 

• Former Obama DOJ-NSD Head Mary McCord was involved in setting up General Flynn in the White House days after the 2017 Inauguration.  Now she is reportedly working for Adam Schiff with her former lawyer at the DOJ, the now ICIG Michael Atkinson.

• Julie Kelly at American Greatness published a post about the ICIG Atkinson. She pointed out his ties to his former boss, McCord:

A report issued last month by Atkinson’s counterpart at the Justice Department, Michael Horowitz, offered a detailed account of how that agency, specifically the FBI, violated the law to obtain a warrant to spy on Carter Page for a year. Horowitz identified 17 “significant errors” on the initial application and three subsequent renewals submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The office responsible for the government’s FISA process is the Justice Department’s National Security Division. The head of the NSD during the first several months of the secret surveillance on Carter Page was acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord.

McCord’s senior counsel? Michael Atkinson.

From July 2016—the same month the FBI opened its investigation into the Trump campaign—until he was appointed the intelligence community’s watchdog in early 2018, Atkinson served as a high-ranking official in the same Justice Department attempting to take down Donald Trump.

McCord, an Obama appointee and Atkinson’s boss for seven months, not only managed three of the four FISAs on Carter Page, she ran the department’s investigation into Trump-Russia collusion until she resigned in the spring of 2017.

McCord is mentioned more than two dozen times in Horowitz’s report. She became the division’s acting chief right before the department approved the first FISA application on Page.

Atkinson was her lawyer.

According to the Horowitz report, McCord “was involved in certain aspects of the [Trump campaign] investigation . . . with the first Carter Page FISA application in September and October 2016.” McCord also attended numerous briefings related to Crossfire Hurricane, the official name of the FBI’s counterintelligence probe into four Trump campaign associates.

McCord, who was interviewed by Horowitz, told the inspector general she informed Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director, that the first FISA application “needed to include more information about who hired [Christopher] Steele.” She recalled “asking about Steele’s fee arrangement with Fusion GPS” just days before the first application was filed on October 21, 2016. (An interesting detail since McCord unconvincingly claimed in a podcast interview last month that she didn’t see Steele’s dossier until it was published in BuzzFeed in January 2017, a common trope recited by Obama loyalists.)

Source: thegatewaypundit.com