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Graham: Senate Will Investigate FBI ‘Bias Against Trump’

Graham: Senate Will Investigate FBI ‘Bias Against Trump’

Lindsey Graham is back at it again, using his position as chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee to try and run defense for his buddy Donald Trump.

One day after a judge ruled that former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort violated his plea agreement when he lied to federal agents, Graham announced he’s going to conduct an investigation into a conspiracy theory surrounding former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Trump and his defenders on Fox News have tried to claim that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant used to wiretap Page — an energy consultant who has documented Russian ties and has given bizarre interviews on cable news — is evidence of some kind of bias against the Trump campaign by the FBI.

And now Graham is reopening that ridiculous conspiracy in yet another attempt to get the attention off of Trump.

Graham is hinging the investigation on an interview former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe gave to CBS’ 60Minutes, in which McCabe revealed that he was concerned Trump or other officials in Trump’s orbit would try to shut down the Russia investigation to cover up their efforts to collude with Russia during the 2016 campaign.

“After Mr. McCabe’s 60 Minutes interview, it is imperative that he, and others, come before the Senate Judiciary Committee to fully explain how and why a FISA warrant was issued against Carter Page and answer questions about what appears to be, now more than ever, bias against President Trump,” Graham said in the statement.

A year ago, the House Intelligence Committee — then run by Republicans — issued a bizarre report about the Page surveillance, claiming it was based on information from the infamous Steele dossier and thus was somehow improper and proof that the FBI was out to get Trump from the start.

However Democrats have said the Page FISA warrant was also based on other things — including that the Russian intelligence operatives had tried to recruit Page in 2013, long before he was hired by the Trump campaign.

But all of this brouhaha aside, the Page FISA warrant is merely a smokescreen for Republicans seeking to muddy the waters and protect Trump, as Page was not the reason the Russia investigation was launched in the first place. Trump can thank his former aide George Papadopoulos for that.

And no matter how much Graham or other Republicans try and run interference for Trump, polls show the public continues to trust that Mueller’s team will come out with the truth.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

Trump Can Only Hope His Lawyers Are Brighter Than Devin Nunes

Trump Can Only Hope His Lawyers Are Brighter Than Devin Nunes

From the Republican perspective, maybe the worst thing about the dueling Nunes/Schiff memos regarding the FBI’s Russia investigation is what they revealed about the intelligence of the combatants. Following the Fox News-amplified thunder of the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign, what strikes me now about the Nunes effort is how breathtakingly dumb it was.

Call me an elitist if it makes you feel better. But if you were being investigated by a prosecutor as experienced and relentless as special counsel Robert Mueller, you definitely wouldn’t want Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) as your lawyer.

By explicitly confirming that the FBI probe of the Trump campaign’s dalliance with Russia began in direct response to staffer George Papadopoulos’s drunken bragging to an Australian diplomat in June 2016, the Nunes memo unintentionally rebutted its own basic argument.

Papadopoulos’s guilty plea confirms the investigators’ judgement.

But no, the so-called “dodgy dossier” compiled by British intelligence agent Christopher Steele didn’t jump-start the FBI  — which never saw his work until September. As Steele, a veteran operative with a sterling reputation in Great Britain, stated all along, some of it was “raw intelligence” that might never be confirmed.

Not that he’s been proven wrong.

Indeed, now that we have Rep. Adam Schiff’s memo rebutting Nunes’s hackwork, it’s clear that many of Steele’s findings were exactly on target. Specifically, Steele reported that International Man of Mystery and former Trump volunteer Carter Page was told during a Moscow trip in July 2016 that the Kremlin had a) collected allegedly compromising information on Hillary Clinton, and b) strongly favored Trump’s election.

Although Page publicly denied meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, he also sent the Trump campaign a memo detailing his “private conversation” with the man. Leaks of stolen Democratic National Committee emails via Wikileaks (remember how Trump “loved” Wikileaks during the campaign?) began three days later.

Given those facts, supplemented by independent FBI sources, why should it matter who financed Steele’s investigation? Or what the four GOP-appointed FISA judges who approved surveillance of Page were told about it?

Evidence is evidence in a court of law.

Because, see, that’s the second big problem with the Nunes memo that Sean Hannity predicted would lead to the imprisonment of Hillary Clinton and half of the “Deep State” operatives of the FBI: its sheer, staggering dishonesty.

Contrary to Nunes and his Fox News enablers, the FBI did not conceal the partisan origins of the Steele dossier from the FISA court. Schiff’s rebuttal directly quotes the warrant application stating that the British investigator had been hired indirectly by a political opponent “looking for information that could be used to discredit [Trump’s] campaign.”

By October 2016, when this hearing took place, Trump had only one serious political opponent. Naming her was as unnecessary there as it is here, and might even have been called prejudicial. Besides, FISA judges had the authority to demand more information had they needed it.

Once again, evidence is evidence in a court of law: The FBI had suspected Carter Page of being a Russian agent since 2013.

Indeed, the Schiff memo perhaps inadvertently reveals (in a footnote) that by September 2016 fully five Trump campaign officials were under FBI scrutiny. As of today three have already pled guilty. Page hasn’t yet been charged with anything, which if I were on Team Trump, might make me nervous. Over the years, he’s probably learned the folly of lying to the FBI.

Political stupidity is one thing. But easily exposed dishonesty is dumber still. To anybody smart enough to take shelter from the rain, the Nunes memo and the choreographed #ReleaseTheMemo campaign lie in ruins. Of course that excludes roughly one-third of American voters, who believe anything Fox News says. But two-thirds don’t, and their suspicions can only have been further aroused.

And then there’s this guy: “The Democrat memo response on government surveillance abuses is a total political and legal BUST,” President Trump tweeted the other day. “Just confirms all of the terrible things that were done. SO ILLEGAL!” Characteristically empty bluster.

Meanwhile. here’s just one of Trump’s many problems: Back about the time Papadopoulos and Page were told that the Kremlin had the goods on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Jr. received an email from a pal representing a Russian oligarch the Trumps had befriended during the 2013 Moscow Miss Universe contest.

The message proposed a meeting to share “dirt” on Clinton that would be provided as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

“If it’s what you say it is, I love it,” Don Jr. responded without hesitation.

The meeting took place at Trump Tower on June 16, 2016. Supposedly the senior Trump was kept completely in the dark, presumably because everybody knew he had no interest in dirt about Hillary.

Nevertheless, if I were the president’s lawyer, I’d do everything in my power to prevent his testifying about these matters under oath. 

Danziger: Trumpian Transparency

Danziger: Trumpian Transparency

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

Why The FBI Investigated Carter Page, ‘Idiot’ Espionage Suspect

Why The FBI Investigated Carter Page, ‘Idiot’ Espionage Suspect

Let’s put it this way: if poor, abused Carter Page wasn’t a Russian agent back when Donald Trump plucked him from obscurity to advise his 2016 campaign, he’d definitely done all he could to look like one. Among the many bizarre aspects of Rep. Devin Nunes’ incompetent and dishonest “Top Secret” memo purporting to discredit the Mueller investigation, pushing this odd bird back into the spotlight ranks near the top.

Why did Trump pick Page in the first place? Publicly praising Vladimir Putin as a stronger, more decisive leader than President Obama surely had something to do with it. Trump loves him some Putin. Imprisoning political rivals gives him a thrill. That Putin opponents keep turning up dead in ambiguous circumstances only proves him a manly, decisive leader.

Then there was Page’s longstanding opposition to economic sanctions against Russia in reaction to its armed incursions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Getting those sanctions lifted was the biggest tangible result the Kremlin hoped to achieve from its cyber-attacks on the U.S. presidential election.So reliably did Carter Page parrot the Putin line during three years living in Moscow that FBI agents first interviewed him in 2013, warning that he appeared to be under recruitment as a Russian spy. Indeed, Time recently found a letter Page wrote to a publisher back then bragging: “Over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month.”

The privilege, mind you.

 Indeed FBI surveillance captured Russian spies talking about their attempts to recruit Page, despite characterizing him as an “idiot.”

“I also promised him a lot,” convicted Russian agent Victor Podobnyy said on an FBI intercept. “This is intelligence method to cheat, how else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go [bleep] himself.”

Page admitted providing the documents.

A Kremlin advisor, and then a Trump advisor. Makes sense to me, although I do wonder exactly who recommended him.

But an idiot? Anybody who watches his March 2, 2017 interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, during which Page first denies, next admits and then lamely tries to spin a meeting with Russian ambassador (and spymaster) Sergei Kislyak during the 2016 GOP convention will find it hard to disagree.

Among other liabilities, Carter Page is a terrible dissembler. The man giggles.

Later that month, Page nipped off to Moscow to speak at the prestigious New Economic School, where he basically stuck to the Putin party line about poor, misunderstood Vladimir’s excuses for military adventurism. Asked by Chris Hayes how many Kremlin bigshots and spies he’d encountered there, Page giggled.

He couldn’t be sure. They don’t wear ID badges, you know.

It was the Moscow junket that seemingly led to Page being asked to step down from the Trump campaign, following directly upon embarrassing news that campaign manager Paul Manafort had received more than $12 million cash from a Kremlin-linked Ukrainian political party.

So no wonder Trump press spokesman Sean Spicer got sent out to deny that the president even knew the guy. Which may even be true. Hence too, however, the sheer absurdity of Devin Nunes’s pronouncement on Fox & Friends that the FBI used tainted evidence “to get a warrant on an American citizen to spy on another campaign.”  

Earth to Nunes: Page resigned from the campaign two months before the FBI reopened its probe of his links to Russian intelligence. Hence the agency’s October 2016 FISA court application to place him under surveillance. To win approval, investigators needed to provide probable cause that he was “knowingly engaging in clandestine intelligence gathering activities for or on behalf of” Russia.

To maintain surveillance, FBI investigators then had to convince a federal judge that valuable new evidence had resulted every 90 days. Key words: “new evidence.” The surveillance continued for a full year, notes Asha Rangappa, a former FBI counter-espionage agent. 

“And then there are all the multiple approaches made by individuals connected to Russian intelligence to Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Jeff Sessions,” Rangappa writes. She adds bluntly but accurately: “Every one of them has lied when asked about their Russian contacts.”

Somebody who lied to the FBI was George Papadopoulos, another Trump campaign lightweight whose drunken boasts to an Australian diplomat about Russian hacking of Hillary Clinton’s emails jump-started the agency’s counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump campaign’s Kremlin connections in July 2016. The Nunes memo’s unwitting confirmation of this fact makes nonsense of all the rest.

Meanwhile, British dossier or no dossier—and it’s worth noticing that  Nunes memo makes no attempt to prove its contents false, merely attacks author Christopher Steele’s presumed motives—it would have been gross dereliction of duty for U.S. intelligence not to give Carter Page a long, hard look.