Posted on 06/01/2019 3:23:57 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
Republicans are targeting former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan as they seek to bring more attention to what they say was an unfair investigation of President Trump launched in the Obama administration.
The effort to spotlight the intelligence officials comes as Democratic calls to impeach President Trump rise in the wake of special counsel Robert Mueller’s first public remarks about his investigation.
The White House says the real controversy is the investigation of Trump that preceded Mueller's probe, an argument Democrats contend is just a conspiracy theory peddled in order to distract from his presidential woes.
Trump and GOP lawmakers are seeking to pin blame on Comey and Brennan over the use of the so-called “Steele” dossier in the surveillance warrant application that ultimately allowed the FBI to wiretap a member of the Trump campaign in 2016.
The dossier, a shadowy document that makes a series of salacious allegations about Trump, has long been a flashpoint for Republicans.
Some Republicans allege that FBI investigators relied too heavily on it to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Some of the allegations in the dossier have been verified, while others were proven false or remain unsubstantiated.
Right-leaning news outlets claim that Brennan and Comey have offered conflicting messages as to who supported including details from the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele’s research in the FISA warrant application.
Trump on Thursday highlighted a Fox News segment on the matter, tweeting: “‘Comey and Brennan are turning on each other.’ @kilmeade”
Fox News, citing anonymous sources and non-public emails, reported in May that a Comey email claimed Brennan wanted to include the dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) analysis. The story was amped up by right-wing news sites as a feud between the two intelligence officials.
Democrats have claimed this is a standard page out of the GOP-playbook for such closed-off inquiries -- leak allegations anonymously about classified or non-public documents or communications, and then push those talking points on television. (*Pot calling the kettle black)
Officials have maintained that the dossier was not included in the analysis, which was released in 2017. The FBI, not the CIA, deals with counterintelligence investigations and thus the applications for FISA warrants.
Brennan has said that the FBI had a responsibility to see if they could verify some of the claims in the document.
“It did not play any role whatsoever in the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done that was presented to then-President Obama and then-President-elect Trump,” Brennan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last year. “I do think it was up to the FBI to see if they could verify any of it.”
Comey — who oversaw the launch of the counterintelligence probe — has publicly stated that he felt the need to brief Trump, then-president-elect, on the dossier. Comey brought up the document during a one-on-one meeting at Trump Tower with the soon-to-be president in January 2017, after Brennan and other top intelligence officials briefed him on the ICA.
There is little evidence to suggest Comey and Brennan, both Trump critics, are at odds over the dossier.
Republicans who claim Comey and top brass at the FBI were biased against Trump have long called for a second special counsel to be tapped to investigate whether the FBI conducted proper surveillance.
Attorney General William Barr has tapped John Durham, a respected U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to review the origins of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference.
The president has worked to clear any hurdles for Barr’s inquiry, ordering intelligence agencies in May to cooperate and giving the attorney general complete power to declassify information related to the investigation.
That fueled further criticism from Democrats, who blasted the president’s declassification order as a further sign Trump will pursue a political agenda at the expense of his own intelligence community.
“Selectively declassifying sources and methods in order to serve a political agenda will make it harder for the intelligence community to do their jobs protecting this country from those who wish to do us harm,” Senate Intelligence Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) said at the time.
Stories about Comey and Brennan have repeatedly surfaced on Fox News.
Former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), a former chairman Oversight and Government Reform turned Fox News contributor, advised GOP members that letters between Comey and Brennan are the key to unlocking who made the dossier decision.
“Whoever is investigating this, tell them to look for emails between Brennan and Comey in December of 2016,” Gowdy said in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity in mid-May.
Republican lawmakers took Gowdy’s cue.
“Comey and Brennan have made a lot of statements, some under oath, about the origins of the Trump Russia investigation, the timing and role of the Steele dossier and reasons for surveillance of Trump campaign officials. As I’ve been saying for awhile now, some of that is inconsistent with the contents of classified documents and the sworn testimony of other witnesses,” Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), a member of the Judiciary Committee, told The Hill.
“And more recently, some of what Brennan and Comey have been saying is now inconsistent with one another. As Attorney General Barr said this morning, it just doesn’t jive. Someone isn’t telling the truth,” he continued.
It's time to ask questions and demand answers.
And yes, whoever is investigating this, let's read Comey and Brennans' emails.
Brennan and Comey are fraud perps.
Lock ‘em up.
I hope Republican lawmakers are going to STFU and let AG Barr do his work.
THE CONGRESS IS NOT A LAW ENFORCEMENT BODY.
What is this. “Unfair” crap?
Just call it what it is. ...Treason!
Really hate these people.
Congress is doing the Judicial work while letting the Judicary do the legislating from the bench that the rest of America doesn’t want to do.
Oh, they’ll put a spotlight on this sordid affair, will they?
Well, good for them but, this nothing more than a three ring circus and I grew up a long time ago.
In fact, it’s not a three rung circus but, a cheap midway carnie act at the county fair and it sucks...
We should target the evil ones.
Talmud (Qohelet Reba 7:16) said
Those who are kind to the cruel
in the end will be cruel to the kind.
We have to hate the bad guys or else we'll end up like Jeb, Kasich, Bill Kristol and George Will---yeccchhhh.
That article is a massive effort at anti-Trump/GOP spin.
Don’t forget Hillary. It’s her money that paid to get all of this started. And now she is headlining a symposium on cyber security? When I first heard that I thought it something made up by John Semmons!
I think it would be more correctly called an "illegal" investigation.
Unfair, yes. Illegal, most definitely.
Total chaos, deliberate misdirection, deliberate lies, fake news and plenty of incompetence thrown in.
Almost impossible to sort out without a program and a spreadsheet.
I agree. That bastard Brennan is a thug. He needs to be ended.
Everybody focuses on the pee tape but that is only unverified and salacious. Michael Cohen was never in Prague and that is proven.
There is so much subterfuge it is hard to even believe the story that Steele paid Russian spies for dirt on Trump. I think there is evidence to suggest that its contents were drafted by HRC’s closest loyalists (e.g. Sydney Blumenthal) and they paid MI-6 agent Steele to write it up to look like intel and put his name on it to give it some semblance of credibility.
For example, a State Dept deputy (named Winer) wrote in the WaPo that Blumenthal had circulated his own dossier alleging Trump+Russia collusion. Another State Dept deputy told the FBI in a memo that Steele had come in for a meeting and told her that “an unnamed institution which had been hacked” was eager to get the dossier info to the public.
And why would the info in the dossier cost $10-12 million? The whole thing was put together in just a few weeks? And Why did Steele have to take a very circuitous route to get the dossier to the FBI when he had been one of their paid confidential sources? Cohen testified that the “pee tape” rumor has been around for years, and the “Trump computers connected to Russian banks” allegation had previously been investigated by the FBI and debunked. The FBI knew this, and thus had reason to doubt the credibility of the dossier. So why did they swear an oath in spite of its obvious flaws?
All this (and more) suggest that Steele himself may have been a cutout representing the dossier’s real author and Steele was specifically chosen to be the “named source” to give the contents an air of independent credibility, and give the FBI paper trail plausible deniability that it knew its real source.
Apparently as I read this, the evil Republicans are hell-bent on tormenting these fine, upstanding, pure-hearted citizens who only had the good of the world in mind when they opened and pursued this investigation.
Damn those Republicans! Damn them all to hell!
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