WSJ Editorial Blasts Media Coverage of Russia 'Collusion' Investigation

A Wall Street Journal editorial is demanding "radical transparency" on the Mueller investigation not only from the FBI and Congress, but also from other news outlets.

Several days ago, Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham released a less redacted version of their criminal referral letter to the Justice Department concerning Christopher Steele -- the former British spy and author of the infamous dossier alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The letter from the two senators clarifies the recently released House Intelligence Committee's memo describing FISA surveillance abuse by the FBI, and provides even more evidence that the Clinton campaign was involved in the controversy.

As the Wall Street Journal explains, the letter "makes public for the first time actual text from the FBI's FISA application, as well as classified testimony the FBI gave the Senate Judiciary Committee about the dossier and FISA application. In particular, the referral rebuts the Democratic claim that the FBI told the FISA court about the partisan nature of the Steele dossier." As Grassley and Graham write in their letter: "The FBI noted to a vaguely limited extent the political origins of the dossier."

Although the letter "stated that the dossier information was compiled pursuant to the direction of a law firm who had hired an 'identified U.S. person' -- now known as Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS ... the application failed to disclose that the identities of Mr. Simpson's ultimate clients were the Clinton campaign and the DNC."

The letter also states that Steele received "at least some of the information" from the Obama State Department. The names of individuals involved were redacted, but it's widely believed that all roads lead to Sidney Blumenthal...

This is the odd part of the story. After Obama won in November 2008...Hillary sent a list of folks that she was to hire around Thanksgiving to the Obama team. Blumenthal was on the list. The Obama team said “NO”. They knew something about the guy, and felt this was not wise.

A month passed. Hillary passed another list of contractor folks to hire (not government employees). Sid was on that list. The White House team said “NO”.

What happened in mid-January is that Sid was hired by the Clinton Foundation. I’ve never seen what they paid him but would assume it’s in the $150k or more salary per year.

The one odd aspect is that it’s been said by some that Sid was one of the people given full access to the bathroom server and her email account. So Sid read all the classified (if true).

What I think occurred is that Hillary has no background for this kind of work, and she needs a ‘mentor’ or expert to guide her.

In particular, the referral rebuts the Democratic claim that the FBI told the FISA court about the partisan nature of the Steele dossier."

It wasn't much of a defense and it was found out very quickly. That thing about sunlight being the disinfectant is true.

The difference between this and Watergate is that in the former the revelations served to increase the power of the people in the media; in this one they serve to threaten it. It is more sordid than mere partisanship, and it may well be a similar historical and cultural watershed. If the only means through which a President can communicate unfiltered is alternate media, then the alternate media win. If the only conduit for the revelation of widespread criminal behavior within the Department of State and the Department of Justice is the alternate media, then that cultural power shift in favor of the mainstream media that took place in the 70's is likely to repeat itself away from its former beneficiaries.

The cozy relationship that has developed between the political power structure and its information gatekeepers is crumbling and they don't know what else to do but patch it and deny furiously that it is happening. If it takes the Internet to pull this rotten tooth then that is only likely to speed the process of that relationship's dissolution.

From link: http://observer.com/2016/03/hillary-has-an-nsa-problem/

........one of the most controversial of Ms. Clinton’s emails released by the State Department under judicial order was one sent on June 8, 2011, to the Secretary of State by Sidney Blumenthal, Ms. Clinton’s unsavory friend and confidant who was running a private intelligence service for Ms. Clinton.

This email contains an amazingly detailed assessment of events in Sudan, specifically a coup being plotted by top generals in that war-torn country. Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from a top-ranking source with direct access to Sudan’s top military and intelligence officials, and recounted a high-level meeting that had taken place only 24 hours before.

To anybody familiar with intelligence reporting, this unmistakably signals intelligence, termed SIGINT in the trade. In other words, Mr. Blumenthal, a private citizen who had enjoyed no access to U.S. intelligence for over a decade when he sent that email, somehow got hold of SIGINT about the Sudanese leadership and managed to send it, via open, unclassified email, to his friend Ms. Clinton only one day later.

NSA officials were appalled by the State Department’s release of this email, since it bore all the hallmarks of Agency reporting. Back in early January when I reported this, I was confident that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from highly classified NSA sources, based on my years of reading and writing such reports myself, and one veteran agency official told me it was NSA information with “at least 90 percent confidence.”

We can confirm that the contents of Sid Blumenthal’s June 8, 2011, email to Hillary Clinton, sent to her personal, unclassified account, were indeed based on highly sensitive NSA information. The agency investigated this compromise and determined that Mr. Blumenthal’s highly detailed account of Sudanese goings-on, including the retelling of high-level conversations in that country, was indeed derived from NSA intelligence.

Specifically, this information was illegally lifted from four different NSA reports, all of them classified “Top Secret / Special Intelligence.” Worse, at least one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access Program, or SAP, several of which from the CIA Ms. Clinton compromised in another series of her “unclassified” emails.

Currently serving NSA officials have told me they have no doubt that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from their reports. “It’s word-for-word, verbatim copying,” one of them explained. “In one case, an entire paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified Top Secret / Special Intelligence.

How Mr. Blumenthal got his hands on this information is the key question, and there’s no firm answer yet. The fact that he was able to take four separate highly classified NSA reports—none of which he was supposed to have any access to—and pass the details of them to Hillary Clinton via email only hours after NSA released them in Top Secret / Special Intelligence channels indicates something highly unusual, as well as illegal, was going on.

Suspicion naturally falls on Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA senior official who was Mr. Blumenthal’s intelligence fixer, his supplier of juicy spy gossip, who conveniently died last August before email-gate became front-page news. However, he, too, had left federal service years before and should not have had any access to current NSA reports. There are many questions here about what Hillary Clinton and her staff at Foggy Bottom were up to, including Sidney Blumenthal, an integral member of the Clinton organization, despite his lack of any government position.

How Mr. Blumenthal got hold of this Top Secret-plus reporting is only the first question. Why he chose to email it to Ms. Clinton in open channels is another question. So is: How did nobody on Secretary Clinton’s staff notice that this highly detailed reporting looked exactly like SIGINT from the NSA?

Last, why did the State Department see fit to release this email, unredacted, to the public?

The report....“From Russia With Money — Hillary Clinton, the Russian Reset and Cronyism”.....
raises serious questions about the cash connections between the Clintons and participants in Hillary's
State Department-era’s failed five-year effort to improve, or “reset,” US-Russia relations.

A Moscow-based Silicon Valley-styled developer of biomed, space, nuclear and IT technologies called “Skolkovo” — allegedly poured tens of millions of dollars into the Clinton Foundation.

Hillary Clinton was at the center of these efforts author Peter Schweizer argues. “Of the 28 US, European and Russian companies that participated in Skolkovo, 17 of them were Clinton Foundation donors” or sponsored speeches by former President Bill Clinton, Schweizer told The NY Post.

<><> Hillary presented the flawed "reset button" to Russia in 2009.

<><> Circa 2010--Ex-Pres Clinton is in Moscow having a laugh w/ Putin. Bill also got a 500,000 speaking fee in Moscow.

<><> A Jan 2014 document shows that Hillary's campaign chair, John Podesta, transferred more than 25,000 of 75,000 shares in a Russian company to Leonidio Holdings LLC, an address listed as his daughter Megan Rouse’s Shannon Court home in Dublin. Rouse operates Megan Rouse Financial Planning from that same address.

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