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a prominent FBI official, Charles McGonigal, was sentenced to a prison stint. He was convicted of conspiracy and bribery involving a Russian oligarch who is known for being an extremely close associate of Vladamir Putin. While this is being widely reported on today there is a very notable omission seen from the various major news outlets covering this sentencing. To set the stage correctly we need to flash back briefly over what we have been told over the past seven or so years. With the rise of Donald Trump in Republican circles, one of the earliest complaints leveled against him...

A former high-ranking FBI official has been sentenced to over four years in prison for colluding with Russian oligarchs.Charles McGonigal, once the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division in New York, faced charges for conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and committing money laundering.McGonigal, 55, from New York City, was sentenced to 50 months in prison and ordered to pay a $40,000 fine on Thursday.McGonigal was arrested earlier this year for conspiring with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch sanctioned by the U.S. government.His guilty plea in August followed a detailed investigation revealing...

The special counsel’s report provides the summary Americans need to understand the breadth of the malfeasance.. Special Counsel John Durham released his long-awaited report on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation Monday. While the 306-page report includes some new details of the Russia-collusion hoax, the Clinton campaign’s role in the plot, and the FBI and intelligence agencies’ misconduct, much of the content merely rehashes what conservative media have reported for the last five years. Still, our country needed a public record of the events that represent one of the biggest political scandals in American history, and on that front Durham delivered. FBI’s...

Newly released notes taken by high-level Department of Justice (DOJ) officials during a March 6, 2017, meeting with FBI leadership expose some of the lengths the FBI engaged in to cover up its spying on the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump. The notes were released on May 8 by lawyers representing former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann as part of an effort to clear him on charges of having lied to the FBI. The notes, in reality, appear to do little to exonerate Sussmann but do provide quite a bit of information on the FBI. The meeting at...

(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) The White House has revoked its support for the Eastern Mediterranean pipeline, a 1,900km project that will transport natural gas from an Israeli-owned offshore drilling site to Egypt, Greece, and Cyprus, The Gatestone Institute reported. The Biden administration discussed the decision with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan but apparently did not include the pipeline’s main beneficiaries—Israel, Greece, Egypt or Cyprus—in the talks. The White House said the EastMed pipeline will harm its “climate goals” and escalate tensions in the region without serving viable economic interests, Keep Talking Greece reported. Erdoğan has opposed the EastMed pipeline because...

Conradson: What about Durham? Is he real or is he just another big lie? Advertisement - story continues below George: My opinion is that Durham is very real… I know who he has interviewed in October 2019. Specific guys with the U.S. intelligence community that should not have been meeting with me, this infamous Australian diplomat, we know he’s spoken to the Italians, to various governments. He has been working non-stop since 2019 where I think he got all the juicy info back then. Then Barr appoints some special council a month before Biden goes to the White House, and...

President Trump granted clemency on Tuesday to 20 people, including three former Republican members of Congress and two people who were convicted of crimes as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He also pardoned four military contractors convicted of killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007, and extended clemency to several people convicted of drug offenses. The pre-Christmas pardons and commutations came as the president has been exploring how to reward friends and allies in the waning days before leaving office next month, with more acts of clemency expected to come.

New text messages released Thursday show FBI officials spied on a Fox News executive over the course of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation that targeted President Donald Trump as a secret Russian agent who illegally stole the election from Hillary Clinton in 2016. The FBI surveilled and recorded a phone call between former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and an unnamed vice president at Fox News, according to a text message sent to fired former FBI official Peter Strzok just weeks before Trump was inaugurated as president in 2017.Agents were targeting former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos,...

What is most interesting is the timing of Gina Haspel's last tour as London Station Chief -- from 2014 to early 2017. That is the same timeframe (specifically, the late summer of 2016) when the FBI approached foreign policy academic and "utility government operative" Stefan Halper to begin the operation targeting Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in an FBI-designed foreign counterintelligence operation, against Team Trump, to be launched in Cambridge, England. The CIA Station Chief is the top intelligence official in any given country. The FBI must inform the Station Chief of what they planned to do and get Station...

Fired FBI special agent Peter Strzok’s latest claims about the events leading to the bureau’s opening of the Trump-Russia investigation are contradicted by the timelines presented in reports by special counsel Robert Mueller and DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. In a new interview ahead of the release of his book, Strzok claimed that Australian diplomat Alexander Downer was spurred to inform the U.S. government about a May 2016 conversation he had in a London wine bar with George Papadopoulos, in which the Trump campaign associate mentioned that Russia might have dirt on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, after hearing...

Assertions that the focus was ‘the Trump campaign’ are now known to be ludicrous Long-sought documents finally pried from U.S. intelligence agencies prove that the Obama administration used the occasion of providing a standard intelligence briefing for major-party candidates as an opportunity to investigate Donald Trump on suspicion of being a Russian asset. I say investigate Donald Trump advisedly. As I contended in Ball of Collusion, my book on the Trump-Russia investigation, the target of the probe spearheaded by the FBI — but greenlighted by the Obama White House, and abetted by the Justice Department and U.S. intelligence agencies —...

Newly released documents reveal the FBI never had even preliminary evidence of a Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia, and instead used a rarely enforced statutory relic – the Foreign Agents Registration Act – as the legal rationale for opening investigations in 2016-2017 and surveilling Trump campaign aides. On July 31, 2016, the FBI opened a counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign’s alleged ties with Russia – nicknamed Crossfire Hurricane – not under espionage conspiracy laws but under FARA. The next month the FBI opened four separate FARA cases into people associated with the Trump campaign. Two other FARA cases were...

For months and months Papadopoulos has accused Italian officials in participating in the Trump collusion scam. Papadopoulos is certain the Italians were working with the Obama CIA to set him up in 2016. Today former US Ambassador to Italy and the Republic of San Marino John R. Phillips was included on the list of unmaskers.

A newly declassified transcript calls into question the entire Crossfire Hurricane investigation: Why was it started, and why did it continue? Attorney General William Barr said last week that “the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness” in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Rather, “there is something far more troubling here.” “Without any basis,” Barr added in his sit-down interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, “they started this investigation of [Trump’s] campaign, and even more concerning actually is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president to sabotage his presidency —...

In late October 2016, less than two weeks before the presidential election, a former adviser to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, George Papadopoulos, denied to an FBI confidential source that the campaign was involved in the circumstances surrounding the hack of the Democratic National Committee's email system, calling the idea "illegal." CBS News has now reviewed the transcript of the conversation between Papadopoulos and the confidential source working for the FBI, and has published key excerpts below. The recorded conversation between Papadopoulos and the confidential source working for the FBI was documented in the December report issued by Justice Department Inspector...

The New York Times admitted on Thursday that the Obama administration deployed multiple spies against the Trump campaign in 2016, confirming recent comments by Attorney General William Barr that 'spying did occur' during the campaign. Following months of angry claims by journalists and Democratic operatives that the Obama administration never spied on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, The New York Times admitted Thursday that multiple overseas intelligence assets were deployed against associates of the Republican nominee. It is not the first time the Times has revealed widespread spying operations against the campaign. In addition to noting that long-time informant Stefan...

Back in December, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified that there were 17 significant "errors and omissions" in the Carter Page FISA application process: The inspector general "identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications and many errors in the Woods Procedures" which guide the FBI's FISA process, according to the 476-page report. "These errors and omissions resulted from case agents providing wrong or incomplete information to the National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence and failing to flag important issues for discussion,” Horowitz said. Horowitz found big problems in the system: “That so many...

Last week, President Trump triggered the left when he tweeted a Photoshopped picture that portrayed former President Barack Obama perched midair outside Trump Tower, binoculars and listening device in hand.The liberal outlet Vox condemned the president for his “increasingly bad tweets,” before declaring “there’s no evidence the Obama administration spied on Trump.” Vox then regurgitated the false narrative that, while the FBI did surveil former Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page, “that didn’t happen until after Page left the campaign.” For years, conservatives tried to correct the record, noting that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) order gave the...

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was behind the leak of text messages between the FBI ‘s Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to the press. A court filing by the Department of Justice late Friday revealed the admission in a five-page statement by Rosenstein on the text messages between the FBI agent and lawyer back in 2016 as they were both working on investigations, Politico reported. (Image: YouTube screenshot) Rosenstein, who stepped down from his position last year, apparently released the messages as a way to protect the FBI employees who criticized then-candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign....

The Justice Department released its fourth batch of documents from the special counsel’s probe Friday, including notes of FBI interviews with former Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. The documents include the FBI’s interviews conducted in 2017 with Papadopoulos and with Page, as well as interviews with Russian associates of Page. The records were provided to BuzzFeed News and CNN in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits for FBI notes, known as 302s, that were used in the Trump-Russia probe. Papadopoulos and Page were two of the four original targets of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI counterintelligence investigation...