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Posted on 02/10/2018 9:03:40 AM PST by jazusamo
FBI Protecting Comey?
The Return of Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal
JW Sues Secret Service Trump Travel-Expense Records
The more we learn about the FBI under James Comey’s supervision the more we have reason to question the activities of the fired FBI Director. Because he has left a trail of suspicious activities in is wake, Comey now stands out as key figure in the Deep State’s illicit attempts to target President Trump.
And it looks like the Deep State is protecting Comey still. We were forced to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for FBI records about former Director Comey’s book, which he signed to write in August 2017 and is set for publication in April 2018 ( Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice , (No. 1:18-cv-00220)).
Our suit also seeks records of communications between Comey and the FBI prior to and regarding Comey’s controversial June 2017 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
We filed on January 31 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the Justice Department failed to respond to our August 14, 2017, FOIA request for:
Comey reportedly received an advance in excess of $2 million for his book, Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, reportedly set for publication on April 17th. Former FBI agents and officials intending to write books concerning their tenure are customarily required to submit the entire transcript for pre-publication review.
A month after President Trump fired Comey on May 9, 2017, Comey provided highly controversial testimony before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the circumstances that led to his dismissal, the ongoing investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s illicit email server. During that testimony , Comey admitted he leaked information about his conversations with President Donald Trump in order to get a special prosecutor appointed. (In November, we filed a separate FOIA lawsuit against the Justice Department for its records about Comey’s testimony.)
Comey seems to have protected status for any misconduct, and we want to know if he had a special deal for his book from his friends in the FBI. The Deep State is in cover-up mode. The FBI, DOJ, and the Special Counsel are stonewalling our requests for Comey documents.
We have several other lawsuits pending for Comey-related records:
On January 11, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg the FBI to turn over the “Comey memos” for in camera review by the court. In doing so, the court rejected arguments by the Sessions Justice Department to dismiss the lawsuits seeking the Comey information.
Unfortunately, on February 2, Boasberg ruled that the “Comey memos” would not be made public. Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller News Foundation almost immediately appealed the ruling. We don’t intend to let up in our pursuit of the truth about the egregious conduct of the FBI’s former director.
Sidney Blumenthal, a long-time hit man for Bill and Hillary Clinton, is back in the news. Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., seemed to suggest Tuesday that Blumenthal was connected to the controversial unverified “Trump dossier.”
We’ve tracked this unpleasant man – so nasty he was nicknamed “Sid Vicious” — over the years: How Hillary Clinton relied on him in defiance of President Obama; how the former secretary of state and Blumenthal kept in touch during her tenure; how she originally wanted him to be a high-ranking adviser.
With Blumenthal’s latest appearance in the spotlight, Micah Morrison, our chief investigative reporter, provides some background on Blumenthal and another Clintonista, Cody Shearer, in this Investigative Bulletin report :
The strange case of the Russian dossier got even stranger this week with a new report from the Guardian raising a name from the seamy side of Clinton past. A “second Trump-Russia dossier” has been turned over to the FBI, the Guardian reported. The second dossier was compiled by Cody Shearer, who the Guardian identifies as a “a controversial political activist and former journalist who was close to the Clinton White House in the 1990s.”
That’s putting it mildly. Shearer in fact has long been linked to the sleaziest aspects of the Clinton operation, mainly through his close relationship with Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal. Longtime observers of the Clinton ecosystem know that when Cody appears, Sid Blumenthal is not far behind. A ceaseless schemer, Blumenthal was so offensive to the Obama White House that he was banned from an official role at Mrs. Clinton’s State Department. But that barely slowed him down. As documented by Judicial Watch and others, Blumenthal was a constant presence by Mrs. Clinton’s side during her State Department years.
Blumenthal and Shearer are connected to a global network of intelligence and military freelancers. They played a dangerous game meddling in Libyan affairs after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. They supplied intelligence to Secretary of State Clinton in the weeks leading up to the Benghazi debacle and pitched deals to make money off the Libyan turmoil. ProPublica reports at length on the Blumenthal and Shearer’s Libyan efforts here . According to Judicial Watch’s reporting , during Mrs. Clinton’s State Department tenure, Blumenthal also promoted African business deals and meddled in European Union elections.
As for Shearer, he has a long history of dirty tricks. He’s been linked to Whitewater-era efforts to dirty up Bill Clinton critics; to shakedown politics involving the Cheyenne-Arapaho Indian tribe; and to fronting for Bosnian Serb butcher Radovan Karadzic. Read more about it here and here .
The Guardian reports that the new Shearer document makes some of the same allegations about Mr. Trump as the original Christopher Steele dossier, including “lewd acts at a five-star hotel” in Moscow. It also notes that Steele passed on the Shearer report to the FBI in October 2016, but would not vouch for its accuracy. That’s worth pausing over.
According to the Guardian, Steele provided “a copy [of the Shearer report] because it corresponded with what he had separately heard from his own independent sources.”
If the reporting here is accurate, that’s quite a coincidence—that Cody Shearer and Christopher Steele were hearing the same things from different sources at pretty much the same time. A closer look at timelines and sources might be revealing. If Sid and Cody are behind the original Russian dossier sources, that would be big news indeed.
Incredibly, an Obama State Department official admitted he and State worked with Steele and Blumenthal directly (and also used Cody Shearer) to gather anti-Trump Russia dirt. This no surprise to us given our find that the Obama/Kerry State Department vacuumed up Russia classified info to create yet another “dossier” to share with a friendly Democratic senator in order to undermine President Trump.
Judicial Watch has other FOIAs pending and planned on Obama State shenanigans targeting Mr. Trump. But it looks like the Obama/Clinton Russia scandal is expanding even as the case alleging Trump-Russia collusion continues to collapse.
The Secret Service is taking the term secret too far, yet again.
We had to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for Secret Service travel-expense records related to expenses incurred protecting President Trump and his family while they traveled between June and October 2017 ( Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:18-cv-00161)).
We sued after the Secret Service, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, failed to respond to nine (!) separate FOIA requests for records regarding:
The Secret Service records document costs for meals, hotels, air/rail, car rentals and other incidentals incurred by the Service while providing protection of the president and his family when they are on personal or political travel.
Last month, we released Air Force records detailing Air Force One travel costs. The total costs for President Trump’s travels recorded in this document production amounted to $3,199,188.30. Added to the previously released costs, the known political and leisure travel costs for President Trump and his family now amount to $13,533,937.28. (To date, we have uncovered total travel expenses of the Obamas amounting to $114,691,322.17.)
The Secret Service secrecy on presidential travel (for both President Obama and President Trump) is inexcusable. It is ridiculous that we have to continue filing federal lawsuits to prod the Secret Service to produce simple expense information about the costs of presidential travel.
This is not the first time we have been forced to file suit over the Secret Service’s failing to respond to FOIA requests for presidential travel-expense records. While monitoring travel for President Obama and his family, we encountered continuous resistance to FOIA requests. Between July 21, 2014 and November 10, 2015, the Secret Service failed to respond to 19 (!!) separate FOIA requests seeking records of security-related expenses for travel by Barack Obama and other VIPs. On November 10, 2015, we filed a FOIA lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia asking the court to actually enjoin the Secret Service from continuing to withhold responsive documents from us ( Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:15-cv-01983)).
We filed a related lawsuit on May 6, 2016 ( Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:16-cv-0863) ) after the Secret Service failed to respond to five (5) additional travel-related FOIA requests. We appealed the District Court’s dismissal of our claim that the agency has a policy and practice of violating FOIA’s procedural requirements in connection with processing of Judicial Watch’s FOIA requests. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard argument on our policy and practices claim on September 15, 2017. I’m hoping we get a positive result from the appeals court soon.
Until next week…
We got along fine without a federal secret police for 135 years. The FBI has proved itself a systsmaticalls corrupt organization. Time to defund.
Drain the Swamp
AND THERE'S MORE---MUCH MORE---ABOUT THIS INDIVIDUAL'S MARAUDING ACTIVITIES
ITEM--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?
CONT
Off the Wall Ping!
Contact to be added.
Who has the power to appoint a special prosecutor????
His having top secret info, in its entirety, unmasks Blumenthal as a treasonous scumbag.....and he must be made to pay the price for it.
HOW DID HE GET IT? One theory making the rounds is that Obama and Rham "pretended" to bar Sid from govt employment. The better to utilize scurvy Sid in these machinations.
ITEM--- Let's see the execution and timing of Obama's PDB's. That might be a "tell."
ITEM---- Let's capture Sid's emails to his employer---The Clinton Foundation---for another "tell."
CONT
Here's how Sid, Valerie Plame, and her husband Joe Wilson, tapped into a bundle of State Dept tax dollars w/ help from their pal, Secy Hillary.
BACKSTORY Sid Blumenthal was (is) the conniving Clintons' bagman---a $325,000 employee of the Clinton Foundation, hired to (gag) promote Clinton's presidential legacy. On the side, Sid promoted dubious foreign deals and schemes in which he had a financial interest many of them predicated on the fall of Libya.
Blumenthal was ambidextrous---emailing Libya foreign policy messages w/ one hand....his other hand firmly in the State Dept cookie jar.
In one (leaked) confidential e-mail to Clinton, Blumenthal was clearly colluding w/ onetime Amb Joe Wilson (Valerie's husband) to score a bundle of tax dollars.
GAME ON Amb Wilson pumped himself as a 'director' of Symbion Power---an outfit seeking millions of dollars in contracts from an obscure government agency chaired by Hillary....the Millennium Challenge Corp (MCC)....a notorious slush fund.
In September 2010, Hillary ordered MCC to award Symbion $47 million tax dollars for (cough) 'power projects in Tanzania.'
......how much of the $47 million tax dollars got to Tanzania after the players divvied it up among Blumenthal, Wilson, the Clintons, Obama?.........
===========================================
FREEPER ACTION PROJECT--DO THIS NOW: demand the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) books be opened. We demand to know the financial details and the scope and dimension of individuals connected to these outrageous State Dept giveaways.........govt parasites like Blumenthal, Plame and her husband pocketing zillions at taxayers' expense.
CONTACT CONGRESS HERE------http://www.contactingthecongress.org/
============================================
Millinium Challenege is also the quasi govt agency Obama took 100 million tax dollars to give to Michelle to give to Morocco "to teach Muslim girls." The 100 million is to be held by the Obama Foundation and doled out "when needed."
(waiting for hysterical laughter to die down)
I sure hope that Tom Fitton employs bodyguards!
Good stuff, thanks for posting!
Slightly Related Questions:
Why has Blumenthal been on the John Batchelor radio show twice in the last week?
Is John Batchelor conservative? Liberal? Objective? (I rarely hear the show, and for me to have listened twice this week and for SB to have been on twice seems highly improbable.)
He sure isn’t afraid to tell it like it is.
>> Sid Blumenthal was (is) the conniving Clintons’ bagman-—a $325,000 employee of the Clinton Foundation,
The Clintons sure have a lot of bagmen. I’ve always heard that McAuliffe was their bagman. Apparently one of many? Or maybe he was sidelined while he was busy destroying Virginia and rigging the voting there while he was Governor.
P.S. Liz, Thanks for all your amazing and informative posts! You must be working your fanny off to keep us all so well-informed. It’s much appreciated.
Americans were duped about Blumenthal’s activities. Now we find that during the same time period:
<><> he was a paid consultant to Media Matters and American Bridge, organizations that helped lay the groundwork for 2016 Clinton’s campaign.
<><> pocketed $320,000 from the Clinton Foundation;
<><> was a paid advisor to businesses seeking Libyan
contracts (compromising US ntl interests, by marketing his influence at the State Dept);
<><> was secretly advising Secy of State Clinton about Libya (coincided w/ his business clients looking to profit in Libya);
<><> pocketed $200,000 a year from Clinton political fixer, David Brock’s, media operations.
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Trump saved us from a President HildaWitch. A fate worse than Obama.
Thanks to Judicial Watch. They get things done to uncover democrat corruption from Hillary on down. And maybe up too. BHO could well get caught up in this web of deceit and corruption.
I’m a little mad at JW this week.
They’re making a HUGE deal out of Presidential Travel costs all of a sudden. 0bama and his gang of GRIFTERS spent $114 MILLION dollars on world-wide VACATIONS and PDJT has spent about $1.99 and they’re suddenly all over this?
Come on!
They’d BETTER just be doing this so it shows how LITTLE PDJT will use, compared to other Presidents!
OOPS! I guess that’s what we’re talking about here, isn’t it? LOL!
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