DougRoss

I have been discussing the Inspector General’s Investigation for a bit now. See: here, here and here.

But exactly who is the Inspector General?

First off, there’s not just one Inspector General. There are 73 Inspector Generals – each related to a specific governmental agency.

The role of federal IGs is to prevent and detect waste, fraud, and abuse relating to their agency’s programs and operations.

Under the Inspector General Act of 1978 IGs are required to be selected based upon qualifications – not political affiliation. However, IGs appointed by the President (about half) are in reality political appointments.

Inspector Generals operate separately from one another but share information and coordinate through the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE).

CIGIE is an independent entity within the executive branch established to address integrity, economy, and effectiveness issues.

The Chairman of CIGIE is Michael Horowitz.

He’s also the Inspector General for the Justice Department (DOJ Bio).

And he’s responsible for conducting the Investigation into activities by the DOJ and FBI leading up the 2016 election.

He has kept details of his investigation surprisingly quiet, despite many information requests by Congress, as evidenced by a short letter which can be found here. To understand the full significance of that letter see, The Inspector General’s Implied Oversight.

The most common criticism of Horowitz is the obvious one: He’s an Obama Appointee.

But Horowitz was no friend to the Obama Administration.

From 1991 to 1999 he served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he was the Chief of the Public Corruption Unit and a Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division.

From 1991 to 1993, Horowitz actually worked under James Comey when Comey was a Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division.

In 2003, Horowitz was nominated by President Bush to serve as Commissioner on the U.S. Sentencing Rights.

In July 2011, Obama nominated Horowitz for Department of Justice Inspector General. Horowitz was sworn in on April 16, 2012.

Horowitz was brought in to replace the retiring Glenn Fine, a Clinton Appointee and ten-year veteran of the position. Fine had been a frequent critic of the FBI – and the Bush Administration. Interestingly, Fine has returned from the private sector and is currently the Inspector General for the Department of Defense.

From the start, IG Horowitz engaged in a long-running battle with Obama’s Administration – especially Attorney General Eric Holder and Holder’s replacement, AG Loretta Lynch.

Horowitz is most famous for his highly critical 514 page report on the “Fast and Furious” program run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

In that report, he recommended that the Justice Department review the actions of 14 officials and consider whether disciplinary action was warranted.

Among those singled out were former Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, former Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson, former ATF Special Agent in Charge William Newell and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein.

Horowitz did not find AG Holder directly at fault:

We found no evidence that Department or ATF staff informed Holder about Operation Fast and Furious prior to 2011.

But Horowitz condemned a DOJ response on behalf of AG Holder. The DOJ response was prompted by a letter sent by Senator Grassley to AG Eric Holder.

From IG Horowitz (begins on page 466):

We believe that the Department should not have made this statement in its May 2 response to Sen. Grassley…Senior Department officials knew or should have known…The May 2 letter was true only in the most literal sense…We believe the Department should not have resorted to a narrowly worded denial of such a serious allegation, particularly when officials in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General knew or should have known…We therefore question the significance or relevance of these ongoing assurances.

We believe that Weich’s testimony sent a confusing message to Congress and the public about whether the Department’s leadership was embracing in full the February 4 and May 2 responses as accurate.

We concluded that the Department officials who included this inaccurate information in the February 4 letter share responsibility with these component officials for issuing an inaccurate letter to Congress.

The report’s conclusions were harsher than expected. The Obama Administration was furious.

This was the most public disagreement between Horowitz and the Obama Administration.

Behind the scenes, a quieter battle had been raging.

Throughout Horowitz’s tenure he has continuously fought for Inspector Generals’ legal right to have unobstructed access to information.

This was something AG Holder had specifically limited – and the FBI had embraced. Holder used this tactic to delay the IG’s Fast and Furious Investigation.

You can hear IG Horowitz discuss these newly imposed limitations – that began in 2010 – during testimony before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on February 24, 2015.

The video is set to start at 6:34 to allow for Senator Johnson’s question. IG Horowitz begins to answer at 7:02.

From his comments:

We got access to information up to 2010 in all of these categories. No law changed in 2010. No policy changed…It was simply a decision by the General Counsel’s Office in 2010 that they viewed now the law differently. And as a result, they weren’t going to give us that information.

It’s frankly from my standpoint inexplicable. Other than a new lawyer making a new decision about a law that hadn’t changed. It shouldn’t be allowed to stand.

There’s nothing more I can do at this point – other than having testified seven times now and sending letters pursuant to the Appropriation Act to you and the other Committees that oversee us.

Horowitz testified on this matter repeatedly. And he continued to testify until he got the requested changes.

September 9, 2014,before the House Judiciary Committee:

Since 2010 and 2011, the FBI and some other Department components have not read Section 6(a) of the IG Act as giving my Office access to all records in their possession and therefore have refused our requests for various types of Department records. As a result, a number of our reviews have been significantly impeded.

We experienced similar objections from Department components that resulted in significant delays in gaining access to important information in other reviews as well, including during the review that culminated in our 2012 report on ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious.

Requiring the OIG to have to obtain the permission of Department leadership in order to review agency records compromises our independence . The IG Act expressly provides that an independent Inspector General should decide whether documents are relevant to an OIG’s work; however, the current process at the Department instead places that decision and authority in the leadership of the agency that is being subjected to our oversight.

September 10, 2014 before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee:

Access issues need to be resolved promptly, hopefully through a legal opinion from OLC finding that Section 6(a) of the IG Act means what it says, namely that the OIG is entitled “to have access to all records . . . or other material available to the” Department, which must be construed as timely, complete, and independent access to information in the Department’s possession.

February 24, 2015, before the Senate Homeland Security Committee:

We continue to face challenges in getting timely access to information from Department components. In particular, the FBI continues to take the position it first raised in 2010 that Section 6(a) of the Inspector General Act does not entitle the DOJ OIG to all records in the FBI’s possession and therefore has refused DOJ OIG requests for various types of records.

August 5, 2105, before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

On July 20, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice issued an opinion that restricts the DOJ Office of the Inspector General’s independent access to records in the Department’s possession that are necessary to carry out our oversight responsibilities. The legal underpinning of the OLC opinion, that the Inspector General Act does not give the DOJ-OIG independent access to all records in the DOJ’s possession despite the IG Act’s express authorization that an Inspector General have access to “all records” within its agency’s possession, represents a serious threat to the independence of not only the DOJ-OIG, but to all Inspectors General.

These are just some examples. Horowitz has testified numerous times on this matter.

On October 18, 2015, he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, asking that Inspector Generals be given greater access to all agency records:

For decades, there was no controversy over what the words “all records” meant. But that changed in 2010 when FBI attorneys suggested, soon after several critical reports by my office as inspector general at the Justice Department, that “all records” might not include some records the FBI was seeking to withhold. This was the first time anyone in the department had asserted that the broad powers of the IG Act did not apply fully to our oversight.

Horowitz’s Editorial is worth a read.

The Obama Administration fought against Horowitz’s efforts throughout the duration of its administration.

As a result of Horowitz’s efforts, legislation – known as the Inspectors General Empowerment Act – was introduced to affirm the independent authority of Inspector Generals. Several versions of the Inspectors General Empowerment Act were introduced – in 2014, 2015 and in 2016.

The Obama Administration fought these Acts tooth and nail – even going so far as to produce an internal legal opinion arguing against the Inspector General’s position.

In response, on August 3, 2015, IG Horowitz sent a blistering letter to Congress. The letter was signed not only by Horowitz, but by all other Acting Inspector Generals as well:

The OLC opinion’s restrictive reading of the IG Act represents a potentially serious challenge to the authority of every Inspector General and our collective ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner. Our concern is that, as a result of the OLC opinion, agencies other than DOJ may likewise withhold crucial records from their Inspectors General, adversely impacting their work.

The only means to address this serious threat to Inspector General independence is for Congress to promptly pass legislation that affirms the independent authority of Inspectors General to access without delay all information and data in an agency’s possession that an Inspector General deems necessary to execute its oversight functions under the law.

It would take over a year, but the 2016 IG Empowerment Act proved the charm. With Republicans in control of Congress and the Obama Administration in its final days, the IG Empowerment Act passed the House and Senate.

Finally, on December 16, 2016, Obama signed the Inspectors General Empowerment Act into law.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz had won his long battle with the Obama Administration.

In an ironic twist, the signing of the Inspectors General Empowerment Act may have led to Horowitz opening his current investigation into the DOJ and FBI. It also gave Horowitz significantly enhanced latitude to pursue all information he deems necessary in his investigation.

This informative twitter thread by @DaveNYviii provides a timeline of Horowitz’s many battles – along with video testimony by IG Horowitz (double-click):

1) Inspector General Michael Horowitz War vs. The Obama Administration pic.twitter.com/bKYIbHuqpj

— TrumpSoldier (@DaveNYviii) December 17, 2017

The Inspector General began his formal Investigation into activities by the DOJ and FBI on January 12, 2017.

On March 21, 2017, IG Horowitz testified again before the House Judiciary Committee.

In this testimony something off-topic came up – which he saved for the very end:

While we have jurisdiction to review alleged misconduct by Department law enforcement agents, we do not have the same jurisdiction over alleged misconduct committed by Department attorneys when they act in their capacity as lawyers.

These types of misconduct allegations against Department lawyers, including those that may be made against the most senior Department lawyers (including those in leadership positions) are handled differently than misconduct allegations made against law enforcement agents or other Department employees.

The OIG has long questioned this distinction between the treatment of misconduct by attorneys acting in their legal capacity and misconduct by other Department employees, and such a system cannot help but have a detrimental effect on the public’s confidence in the Department’s ability to review misconduct by its own attorneys.

Then, on July 26, 2017, IG Horowitz testified again before the Senate Judiciary Committee. This time on FARA – the Foreign Agents Registration Act:

Our audit identified concerns with the Department’s [DOJ] efforts to enforce FARA and the administration and monitoring of FARA registrations.

We found that there were different interpretations by NSD lawyers and FBI agents regarding the intent of FARA and what constitutes a “FARA case”, and that this was indicative of the lack of a comprehensive DOJ enforcement strategy on FARA.

FBI agents also expressed frustration about a perceived reluctance by NSD to approve FARA cases for prosecution, a criticism that NSD officials denied, although NSD simultaneously acknowledged the need to improve communication with investigators about the reasons for approval decisions.

We also identified that NSD needs to improve its controls and oversight of FARA registrations, particularly its efforts to ensure the timely submission of required documents and its inspections of registered foreign agents. We found that 62 percent of initial registrations were untimely.

Horowitz’s report was titled, Audit of the National Security Division’s Enforcement and Administration of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. It was published in September 2016.

The initial Mueller Indictments of Manafort and Gates centered around FARA violations…

Horowitz appears to be addressing structural issues he’s encountering in his underlying DOJ/FBI investigation with the Judiciary Committees of both the House and Senate.

Two months after his Senate Judiciary FARA testimony, IG Horowitz launched Oversight.gov on October 1, 2017. It represents an impressive effort to increase transparency – and direct public disclosure.

The new site brings together the work of all 73 federal IG Offices. There is also an associated twitter account @Oversight.gov.

Horowitz included all information from fiscal 2017 within the site. It’s updated on an ongoing basis.

Oversight.gov was created by the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) to consolidate in one place all public reports from Federal Inspectors General (IGs) in order to improve the public’s access to independent and authoritative information about the Federal Government.

The site includes a publicly accessible, text searchable repository of reports published by IGs.

There’s an entire section devoted exclusively to Inspector General Investigations. You can find out a bit more background on the site’s history here.

It should be a site worth watching.

Thus far, all I’ve discovered regarding IG Horowitz appears to indicate he’s a man of integrity, possessed with a useful and persistent determination.

Exactly the type of person one would want for an investigation of this magnitude.

I look forward to reading his coming report.

On Tuesday, Gowdy dismissed the possibility that the FBI’s investigation of President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was anything inappropriate. Gowdy told Fox News that he is “even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do” in its secret investigation.

In response, Bongino told Ingraham, “Gowdy’s appearance was disgraceful.” He added that Gowdy’s statements were not only “completely out of line,” but also “factually incorrect.”

“According to Gowdy, the FBI ran it by the book, how the Americans would have wanted them run the investigation. Really? So why didn’t they notify Congress for eight months, Laura – eight months – about the investigation, when prior procedure was to notify Congress quarterly on sensitive investigations?” Bongino asked.

He also pointed out the leaks of significant information by the investigators to the New York Times and the Washington Post, in October and January.

“Is that an example, Mr. Gowdy, of a finely tuned investigation, run like the Americans would have wanted?”

“He did nothing but feed the leftist propaganda machine yesterday,” Bongino concluded.

Senator Marco Rubio, R-Fla., also made statements on Tuesday attempting to dismiss the scandal.

Our flawed immigration system is one of the most pressing problems facing our nation today. The flood of illegals continuing to pour across our borders poses threats to our national security and brings an epidemic of crime, drugs, disease and countless other problems while border agencies are limited in their response.

Then-candidate Trump promised to build a wall to thwart illegal immigration and demanded legislative action to stem the flood of illegals. House Speaker Paul Ryan and fellow leftwing Republicans, along with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have done nothing.

The conservative House Freedom Caucus (HFC) supports H.R. 4760, The Securing America’s Future Act (aka the Goodlatte bill) proposed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.). The Goodlatte bill provides temporary, renewable legal status to about 700,000 illegal alien youths who signed up under President Obama’s Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order. But Goodlatte also provides a laundry list of border security measures, including funding for the Wall, an end to chain migration and the diversity visa, and other measures. The bill has enough good features that it even earned the endorsement of the stridently anti-amnesty NumbersUSA.

Recently, Reps. Will Hurd (R-Texas), Jeff Denham, (R-Calif.), and Carlos Curbelo, (R-Fla.) proposed using what is called a discharge petition to force a vote on a much broader set of immigration proposals. A discharge petition allows a bill to be released from committee for a floor vote over the objections of committee chairs and House leadership. It requires an absolute majority of House members — 218 votes — to succeed.

Speaker Ryan promised the HFC to whip the Goodlatte bill and provide an up-or-down floor vote on that bill alone by offering a resolution that would have ended the discharge petition crisis. In return for this pledge, HFC members promised to support the very contentious corporate-welfare-loaded Farm bill, which National Review columnist Michael Tanner called “a dog’s breakfast.” However, at the last minute, Ryan pulled a bait-and-switch, telling the HFC that the “Goodlatte” bill to be offered would contain unspecified modifications. The HFC balked, and the Farm bill went down in flames.

Open borders Republicans have teamed with the Democrats and are now merely four votes short of the discharge petition’s necessary 218, and Republican backers say they can get the rest of the votes. If they succeed, four separate immigration bills will come to the floor — Goodlatte, two other GOP proposals, and one from Democrats. The one getting the most votes — the so-called “queen of the hill” — will win. In competition with other bills, Goodlatte will fail, because there are too many Republicans carrying water for the Chamber of Commerce, which wants total amnesty. The Democrat proposal, or something close, will succeed, because it will be the only one they vote for — in essence giving Democrats a major win on amnesty in the run-up to November.

Trump is unlikely to sign the bill, but that won’t matter. The House GOP will have already further alienated a base already demoralized and infuriated by their relentless thwarting of President Trump’s immigration agenda. More than anything else, his tough stance on immigration won him the White House, and the GOP betrayal will make already challenging midterm election prospects even dimmer.

Both House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Majority Whip Steve Scalise have publicly denounced the discharge petition.

A week ago, McCarthy described how it could affect prospects for November: “If [the] election is today, we win. We will continue to grow. But … Intensity levels are still not there, and discharge petitions release the power of the floor that the American people gave us the responsibly to hold. When you release that power the majority goes to Nancy. If you want to depress intensity [i.e. voter turnout] this is [the] number one way to do it. We can debate internally but don’t let someone else like Nancy decide our future.”

Great words, but every D.C. insider knows that if McCarthy and Scalise used their combined power to stop the discharge petition, very few Republicans would dare support it. Instead, they have done nothing. Furthermore, one of the key petition supporters is Elise Stefanik — the youngest woman ever elected to Congress and a close friend of Speaker Ryan. It is unlikely she would defy leadership on this critical issue, so she must have received a quiet nod.

Rick Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government, has said, “By Ryan and McCarthy’s own admission, allowing this discharge petition is the death knell to the Republican majority in November. The fact that they refuse to stop it demonstrates either extraordinary weakness or willful deception about their opposition to the Democrats’ running the table on amnesty.”

Paul Ryan is retiring this year. Unfortunately, he is departing with a final middle finger to the HFC, the only House members consistently honoring their campaign pledges to do their jobs. Little will change if the House remains on its current trajectory. Ryan’s anointed successor, Majority Leader McCarthy, is at least as bad. Majority Whip Scalise, whose name has been circulated as well, abandoned his conservative mantle when he joined the leadership team. All are willing to surrender the House to Democrats in order to keep the monies rolling in from the Chamber of Commerce — the cheap labor seeking engine for amnesty.

If McCarthy and Scalise want to show true leadership they have to use the full power in their hands to stop the discharge petition. If they will not do this, they are enabling the Democrats. If they cannot do this, they are weak and ineffectual. In either case, they do not deserve leadership.

There is currently an effort afoot to draft HFC member Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) as candidate for House Speaker. An open letter to Jordan has received 801 signatures as of this writing, urging him to run and “Clean House.” Rep. Jordan is the kind of leader our nation desperately needs at this critical juncture.

The days of GOP betrayal, equivocation and incompetence have to end. A Jordan speakership would re-energize the base and give it reason to turn out in numbers in November. The alternative, a Nancy Pelosi Democrat-controlled Congress, would further thwart the Trump agenda, seek to impeach him, and set the stage for a Democrat presidential victory in 2020. Trump’s substantial achievements will be rolled back and it is doubtful our nation could survive another Obama-esque presidency.

James Simpson is an economist, businessman and investigative journalist. His latest book is The Red Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America. Follow Jim on Twitter & Facebook.

Flash back to September 2016, and let’s revisit a rumor that circulated widely in certain circles. It has been recounted so many times that it serves almost as a bedtime story for the Right. The scene: it’s the first joint appearance between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton—the Commander-in-Chief Forum sponsored by NBC—and it has just finished. Backstage, the now-disgraced moderator Matt Lauer is waiting to shake hands with the former first lady— but, instead, he is confronted by a furious Clinton and her entourage.

What faux pas had he committed? Apparently, Lauer had asked Clinton a question about her illegal email server that she was not prepared to answer, a question that she had not pre-approved.

According to the NBC insider who witnessed the scene, Clinton “proceeded to pick up a full glass of water and threw it at the face of her assistant and the screaming started.” She then lost her temper and began shouting at her staff. “You f —ing idiots, you were supposed to have this thing set up for me and you’ve screwed it up! If that f—ing bastard wins we all hang from nooses! Lauer’s finished…and if I lose it’s all on you ass—-s for screwing this up.”

This is a fantastic scene, one which would be hard to believe, if Clinton had not spent most of 2017 whining about her loss in assorted public forums, and blaming everyone but herself. The American public now understands that profanity-laced displays of manic rage are perfectly in keeping with the character of the former first lady so aptly nicknamed “Lady Macbeth” by a portion of the press. What makes this tirade so interesting, of course, is the dire prophecy that a Trump presidency would see Hillary and her gang not just humiliated or defeated but hanging by nooses—that is, presumably executed for treason.

Our Dumb Intelligence Community

Fast forward to 2018, and the scene now makes perfect sense. A growing segment of the American public now knows that the country’s intelligence community was spying on the Trump campaign, and then attempting to sabotage the Trump Administration with false allegations of “Russian collusion.” That’s #Spygate in a sentence.

A long and tawdry web composed of lies, obstruction, and leaking has slowly been unraveled until the falsehoods of the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, and other assorted deep state actors were revealed. FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe has been fired, and is counting his GoFundMe cash in preparation for large legal bills. Former FBI Director James Comey publicly set fire to his reputation during his recent book tour. James Clapper was hired recently on CNN to analyze all the nefarious stuff he did as the former director of the national intelligence. Last, but certainly not least, former CIA head John Brennan has had to settle for pompous raging on Twitter—which is just about the most amateur thing that an ex-spymaster can possibly do. The erstwhile leaders of our “intelligence community” have proven to be not very intelligent at all.

Meantime, almost the entire American press, which is paid to be #WithHer at all times, have been sidelined by the largest political scandal since Watergate. Most of them spend their days murmuring meaningless sentences that start with “Stormy Daniels” and “Russia collusion.” They are not merely uninterested in the truth about Spygate—they are actively attempting to conceal it. What happens when the deep state people who leak to you are themselves in a deep state of trouble? It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone at the New York Times or the Washington Post to wonder. Or CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, or ABC if we’re being thorough. They all threw in their lot with the Brennan-Clapper-Comey conspiracy, without reservation or hesitation.

Journalism’s Decline and Fall

What happens when viewers understand that their favorite news outlet has indulged in the ultimate fake news narrative of the 21st century? Already, CNN’s ratings have entered something like a death spiral. Still, the problem is much greater than one network’s self-destruction. The entire profession of journalism is facing a massive existential crisis. When you knowingly lie to the public in order to help disgraced public officials cover up their role in conspiring against a sitting president, you’re not really a journalist anymore, are you? The mainstream media has been, as spies used to say, compromised.

Instead, it has fallen to a hardy fellowship of independent reporters to break the Obama-backed and Hillary-initiated Spygate story: John Solomon and Sara Carter, Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal, Mollie Hemingway and Sean Davis at The Federalist, Sean Hannity and his colleagues at Fox, and Andrew C. McCarthy at the National Review, among others. Invaluable documents have been unearthed by Tom Fitton and his staff at Judicial Watch. Not to mention the anonymous citizen-journalists and the small websites that started this story when no mainstream reporter would touch it. None of these people will be receiving any Pulitzers for their part, but that’s an award for phonies now, anyway. These reporters have done better than that: they have covered their names with glory.

What Comes Now?

This awful episode in our history has also thrust into the spotlight some unlikely heroes in Congress. Chief among them is Devin Nunes, an almost unknown congressman from the rural 22nd district of California when John Boehner picked him to be the youngest chairman in Congress, and the head of the House Intelligence Committee no less. Nunes has turned out to be the Cincinnatus of our days. He has almost single-handedly dragged this conspiracy out into the open (though Chuck Grassley and Trey Gowdy deserve to be mentioned, too). Now the final act has begun. What happens next will determine the fate of the republic.

Make no mistake: the American intelligence services have been caught red-handed attempting to subvert the 2016 election. If the ringleaders are not brought to justice soon, there will be little reason for ambitious and unprincipled men to fear attempting such a coup again. Just witness their collective behavior as we speak. Having been caught, these deep state bigwigs are unwilling to comply with congressional oversight, and openly are defying both the president and the House. You can almost hear the whispering in the halls of Congress: what should we do?

To the central question on the minds of every thoughtful citizen: do we have a constitutional democracy or don’t we? Are the people still the sovereign power or not? (Someone should go and ask Rod Rosenstein, as he appears to think that he is in charge of the country.) I have two predictions. The first is that Trump, Nunes, and Grassley will ultimately sort this out. The second is my hope for the future: that there will be a statue of Devin Nunes, someday, in his town of Tulare where patriots will come to visit and people will light candles to his memory. If we still have a republic, it will be in no small part thanks to him.

LevinTV host Mark Levin called out Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., on the radio Wednesday over the lawmaker’s claims that the FBI did the right thing by planting a spy in the Trump campaign.

As he played clips of Gowdy’s multiple television appearances on the subject, Levin (the former chief of staff to Attorney General Ed Meese) dissected the congressman’s Spygate apologetics point by point.

“The Left has what it wants” thanks to Gowdy, Levin concluded, “Another putative Republican, retiring so he’s free to ‘speak his mind,’ such as it is.”

Listen:

Who is protecting #FreedomOfThePress?

Sadly, it isn’t the press! @LevinTV succinctly lays out the basics of #Spygate

Watch more LTV only at #CRTV:https://t.co/lkcHkMPqiJ pic.twitter.com/8CBsXkdmDS

— CRTV (@CRTV) May 30, 2018

• There is a debate over whether former Cambridge professor Stefan Halper, who kept tabs on three Trump campaign advisers, was an FBI informant or a spy.
• One of the key questions to the debate is: Who tasked Halper with contacting Trump campaign advisers Carter Page, Sam Clovis, and George Papadopoulos?
• Carter Page holds the key to many questions surrounding Halper.

A battle of semantics has dominated the revelation that the FBI used a Cambridge professor named Stefan Halper to keep tabs on three Trump campaign advisers. The argument is over whether Halper was a mere FBI informant or a spy, as President Trump has asserted.

But the debate has overshadowed more important questions about Halper’s role in “Crossfire Hurricane,” the code name for the FBI’s investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.

The core questions are: Who tasked Halper, a former University of Cambridge professor, with contacting Trump campaign advisers Carter Page, Sam Clovis, and George Papadopoulos? What did they tell Halper, and what did he in turn tell his FBI/CIA handlers? And how was that information used by government officials in their investigation of possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election? Was Halper a credible source?

Carter Page holds the key to many of those questions.

An energy consultant and former Naval officer, Page was the first Trump associate known to have made contact with Halper. He also stayed in touch with the 73-year-old the longest of any of the three Trump advisers — from July 2016 to Sept. 2017. The pair met multiple times, including at Cambridge and at Halper’s farm in Virginia.

That 14-month window leaves open numerous possibilities for Halper’s intelligence-gathering activities.

But Page tells The Daily Caller News Foundation that in his conversations with Halper, he never departed from what he has said publicly in response to the allegations made about him in the infamous Steele dossier.

“I never did anything even remotely wrong [or] similar to what’s alleged in the Dodgy Dossier,” Page says was his general message to Halper when the subject of collusion came up in conversation.

The dossier, written by former British spy Christopher Steele and funded by Democrats, accuses Page of being the Trump campaign’s main back channel to the Kremlin for the purposes of collusion. The dossier claims that Page met with two sanctions Kremlin insiders, Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin. Page has vehemently denied the allegations.

Halper’s interactions with Clovis and Papadopoulos were more limited than those he had with Page. Clovis, the campaign’s national co-chairman, met with Halper once on Sept. 1, 2016 over coffee to discuss the campaign and their mutual interest in geopolitical issues.

The next day, Halper reached out to Papadopoulos through email — unbeknownst to Clovis — to offer to fly the young Trump aide to London to discuss writing an academic paper about Mediterranean energy issues. Papadopoulos accepted and flew to London on Halper’s dime. He was paid $3,000 for the paper, which he submitted in early October 2016.

During one dinner conversation, Halper asked Papadopoulos whether he was involved in Russian hacking of Democrats’ emails. Papadopoulos vigorously denied the allegation, much to Halper’s frustration.

But it is now clear that Halper was collecting some information on Page. And there has been speculation that whatever information he collected was provided to the FBI for use in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants granted against Page.

During a press conference on Tuesday, Speaker Paul Ryan linked the issue of allegations about FISA abuse to the revelation of a Trump campaign informant.

“FISA abuse is a serious issue,” Ryan said when discussing House Republicans’ request for information about the FBI’s top-secret source.

The first FISA warrant authorizing surveillance on Page was granted on Oct. 21, 2016. Three renewals were granted in January, April and June 2017. They expired in September 2017, the same month that Page and Halper fell out of contact. As has been widely noted, FISA renewals require additional evidence showing probable cause that a surveillance target is acting as an agent of a foreign power.

What Page and Halper discussed in their encounters looms large over those FISA warrants as well as over “Crossfire Hurricane.”

Page says he can’t recall many details of what he and Halper discussed over their 14 month relationship. But he says that nothing he said would support the idea that he was involved in collusion on behalf of the Trump campaign with Russia.

“I’m not concerned about this other stuff,” Page told TheDCNF, referring to the Halper angle.

Though Page says he never had conversations with Halper in which he said anything that would support allegations in the dossier, what Halper may have relayed to the FBI is another matter. And Halper’s track record as an intelligence gather has already been called into question.

As TheDCNF reported, Halper has been accused in the past of making “absurd” and “false” claims about Russian infiltration at Cambridge, where he oversees the Cambridge Security Initiative, a group that brings together academics, businesses and former intelligence officials.

As The New York Times reported on May 18, Halper was who expressed concerns back in February 2014 about then-Defense Intelligence Agency Director Michael Flynn’s interactions at a Cambridge event with a Russian academic named Svetlana Lokhova.

Those concerns, which were that Flynn’s interactions with Lokhova suggested that he could be compromised by Russian intelligence, were also shared with American authorities. The entire saga was first reported on May 17, 2017 by The Wall Street Journal.

But Lokhova, a historian of Russian intelligence agencies, says that Halper was behind the “false allegations.” She has vigorously denied having anything close to an improper relationship with Flynn.

In December 2016, Halper also resigned from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar after claiming he was worried about Russian infiltration of that program. But Christopher Andrew, the convener of the seminar and the chief of historian of Britain’s MI5 intelligence service, called Halper’s concerns “absurd.”

Asked whether Halper could have provided false information to the FBI about him, Page was open to the possibility.

“He may very well have,” he told TheDCNF.

“The reality is there are a lot of lies in there. So whether it was him or whoever, they came to the wrong conclusion.”

There is virtually no visibility into what information Halper collected on Page or any of the other Trump advisers. It’s also unknown what he passed to the FBI. But there is one piece of correspondence that suggests that Halper was sympathetic and supportive of Page and that he presented himself as critical of the collusion allegations.

“It seems attention has shifted a bit from the ‘collusion’ investigation to the ‘contretempts’ [sic] within the White House,” Halper wrote on July 28, 2017.

“I must assume this gives you some relief,” he continued, signing off with “be in touch when you have the time. Would be great to catch up.”

Page has discussed another encounter with Halper in which he says the professor seemed to dismiss the allegations of collusion.

It was Summer 2016 after then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to then-FBI Director James Comey accusing Page of being a Russian agent. The letter, it is now known, relied heavily on allegations from the Steele dossier.

Page said that when he and Halper discussed the letter, Halper “rolled his eyes” as if he disapproved of the Reid allegations.

The Clinton campaign and its opposition research were the starting point of Spygate. And Mueller’s hound dog face scowling from a thousand CNN screens (roughly its viewership when you subtract airports, bars and Marin County) were the endpoint. But the media was Spygate’s interface.

Hillary’s Fusion GPS mercs used the media to spread their smear. Mother Jones’ David Corn was the first man on the ground. But there were plenty of others. And that’s only to be expected. Opposition research is useless if the media won’t pick it up. And the best opposition research looks like a story generated by a dedicated reporter, not some sleazebag employed by the other guy’s campaign.

In real life, those Pulitzer scandal scoops come from story-launderers who handfeed stories to reporters, sometimes even writing their hit pieces for them. What the media likes to pretend is journalism is really just a bunch of PR and shadier outfits like Fusion GPS waging a shadow war using corporate media.

But the media didn’t actually run the Clinton-Steele dossier. Until BuzzFeed slipped up, no one did. Instead the dossier was meant to serve as a primer for media hit pieces that would then be used to justify actions by the Obama administration. For example, the FISA warrant application cited a Yahoo News story by Michael Isikoff that had been based on the Clinton campaign’s opposition research.

Fusion GPS had introduced Isikoff to Steele while telling the reporter that the FBI was interested. In the next phase of Hillary’s human centipede, Isikoff wrote a story which was used by the FBI to support its claims. Clinton opposition research was the source for both the FBI investigation and the media hit pieces. But by concealing that fact, the media manufactured an echo chamber in which both its outlets and the “intel community” appeared to be deploying mutually reinforcing narratives about Trump.

Joe Biden claimed that he and Obama were briefed about the dossier by intelligence officials because they were afraid that the information would leak. But Obama’s Director of National Intelligence would leak it to CNN after Trump was briefed about it. And former FBI boss Comey claimed that he had to brief Trump because CNN had the dossier. CNN and government conspirators were reinforcing each other.

Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe informed Comey that CNN would use the existence of the briefing as the basis for its story. “The trigger for them is they know the material was discussed in the brief and presented in an attachment," he wrote.

How did McCabe know what CNN’s trigger for running the story would be? And why would he need to have that information and distribute it within the Bureau? The obvious explanation is coordination.

The media used the leaks about the briefing to justify reporting on the allegations. Obama officials used media interest to justify their own interest. And the media used the interest of Obama officials to justify their interest.

But that’s how echo chambers work.

Echo chambers blow up stories by spreading a single narrative into a broad stream of integrated loops that appear diverse when they’re actually the same. (That’s none too coincidentally how the left operates. Its diversity is just a series of front groups controlled by a small number of ideological bosses.)  What ordinary people see are a lot of experts, organizations and agencies all saying the same thing.

So there must be something to it.

But this time the media wasn’t just manufacturing a messaging consensus through its echo chamber. Instead it was directly involved in a conspiracy that eavesdropped on the political opposition and that is attempting to overturn the results of the 2016 election using not only dirty tricks, but the government.

Media smears are nothing new. Media coups are a whole other thing.

James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, allegedly coordinated with CNN. And then took a job at CNN. Clapper isn’t alone. Obama’s CIA boss, John Brennan, is over at NBC News. Josh Campbell, Comey's assistant, is at CNN. The three arms of the Deep State offer interchangeable employment. Much as Fusion GPS was paying the wife of a top DOJ official to investigate Trump.

This is what organizational integration looks like. And that’s what a Deep State looks like.

CIA or CNN? Who can tell the difference?

The investigation of the investigation has made it very clear that top CIA and FBI people were coordinating with the media. When CNN knows what’s going on at the FBI, that’s a leak. But when the FBI knows what’s going on at CNN, that’s close coordination.  

Spygate depended on close coordination between Clinton’s people, the media and Obama’s intel folks. But it was the media that lubricated the alliance of the Democrat Deep State behind the coup.

Hillary Clinton’s nasty little trolls were the least useful to the process. The media could have easily done its own dirty work. But it’s a testament to its laziness that it needed political operatives to write its story for it. Every time you read glowing media porn accounts of dedicated reporters holding Trump accountable, remember that the media couldn’t even be bothered to invent the hit piece it’s milking.

If CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post were really full of brilliant investigators, Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be out six figures and they wouldn’t have needed Fusion GPS to do their job for them.

The intel and investigatory side had vast powers that were used to do what none of the other players could. But the only way to mask the police state abuses involved in spying on the political opposition was to have some padding between Clinton campaign operatives and Clinton allies in the DOJ.

The media was the peanut butter and jelly in a Clinton scandal sandwich. It covered up the Clinton origins of the conspiracy theory that fueled Spygate by claiming that it had to protect its sources in the same way that the FBI claimed that it had to protect its sources. They were protecting the same source.

Hillary Clinton.

But the term “source” is a misnomer. It implies that the media and Obama intel officials were gathering information when they were actually coordinating a plan of attack against Trump.

There were no sources here because nothing was being found out or discovered, only planted.

Sources come from outside your organization. Spygate ran by pretending that the media, the Clinton campaign and the FBI represented different organizations. Each one “discovered” material from another allied organization. Each discovery justified an organizational response and each organizational response then justified reciprocal responses by the other organizations creating the vicious cycle we’re living in.

The Clinton campaign “discovered” information which it passed along through the government and the media. The media had to report on this “discovery”. Intel officials also had to investigate it. The media had to report on their investigation. The intel officials had to take action based on that reporting. 

And so on and so forth.

But collapse the organizational boundaries and there’s no discovery, just the Deep State.

The media acts as the interface between conspirators, the organizational mortar offering lucrative jobs for campaign and intel officials, and the lubricant for the organizational imperatives of its allies who can always justify further action because the media has made it a story by reporting on it.

The media Deep State enjoys the highest level of legal protection and the lowest level of accountability. That exposed it to the least risk in a conspiracy against America. It was not the most powerful player in Spygate. But it had the most range and the fewest limitations. FBI officials and Clinton campaign officials might face legal sanction, but the media figures that made the conspiracy possible never will.

And that’s why the media must be held accountable.

The question was whether the FBI had ordered undercover agents to “spy” on the Trump campaign in the spring and summer of 2016, well before Donald Trump had won the Republican nomination for president.

Here is the transcript:

Behar: … So, I ask you, was the FBI spying on Trump’s campaign?

Clapper: No, they were not. They were spying on, a term I don’t particularly like, but on what the Russians were doing. Trying to understand were the Russians infiltrating, trying to gain access, trying to gain leverage and influence which is what they do.

Behar: Well, why doesn’t he like that? He should be happy.

Clapper: Well, he should be.

Clapper’s admission – for that’s what it was – was astonishing: the FBI had in fact infiltrated the Trump campaign and was spying on the candidate and his team. 

That’s a first. And it’s on the record.

Remember all the indignation from the deep state when Trump claimed that the FBI had “wiretapped” Trump Tower? While Trump might not have used the term of art, he was right. He and his campaign were the targets of hostile U.S. government surveillance.

Clapper has tried to wrap himself in the flag, spinning his monumental admission as an effort to “protect” the Trump campaign from nefarious influence from bad Russian actors.

But such claims fall flat for one simple reason: whenever the FBI discovers through a counter-intelligence investigation that an American has been targeted by a foreign power, they almost always inform the American to warn them off. 

I know. It has happened to me. (More on that below).

Certainly not in the spring of 2016, when the FBI detected the first effort to penetrate the Trump campaign by a suspected Russian agent, Joseph Mifsud.

How do we know this? Because in their cockamamie indictment of George Papadopolous, Robert Mueller’s legal team told us that a suspected Russian agent, code-named “the Professor,” twice approached Papadopolous in London with an offer to provide damaging information on Hillary Clinton obtained by the Russian government. Papadopolous then blabbed about the stolen emails at a bar with an Australian diplomat, an event the FBI claims “triggered” the investigation into the Trump campaign.

The next attempt to penetrate the Trump campaign came soon afterwards, when Stefan Halper, a long-time CIA asset, again dangled the Clinton emails to a Trump campaign volunteer, Carter Page. As we learned on Wednesday, Halper also met with top Trump advisor Sam Clovis, in a failed attempt to insinuate his way into the campaign.

But Halper wasn’t acting on behalf of the Russians. As we learned just recently, he was an FBI mole.

Clapper wants us to believe that the intelligence community was protecting the Trump campaign and that the President should thank them.

But the truth is just the opposite. Once the intelligence community detected some type of approach by Mifsud – possibly by a Russian agent, possibly not –- they took no steps to notify Donald Trump or anyone involved in his campaign in order to “protect” our political process. Instead, they launched a classic undercover operation in an attempt to entrap campaign workers, and hopefully the candidate himself, into accepting Russian offers to help them against candidate Clinton.

But this also failed, because there never was any Russian offer. The Russia-collusion spin, jinned up in January 2017 by Clapper, Comey and Brennan, was just a sham, a deception to take our eyes away from what had really been going on.

They wanted to hide the sting operation. And no wonder: it’s called treason, a series of overt and covert acts aimed at overthrowing the duly elected government of the United States.

Who was behind the plot against Trump?

Clearly Clapper was involved; he has admitted as much. Senior officials at the FBI and the DoJ also were involved, but according to their accounts, not until they filed the first wiretapping request with the FISA court in late July 2016.

So what other U.S. intelligence leader would have the power and the authority to engage covert assets operating overseas in an operation against an American political campaign? Only one: CIA director John Brennan.

Both Brennan and Comey have been furiously attacking Trump in recent weeks, as Congressional investigators and the Department of Justice Inspector General gets closer to revealing their illegal acts. I believe they both should be indicted for treason.

In 1996, I was reporting on the Gore-Chernomyrdin commission, which the U.S. and Russian governments established to exchange information on (then) alleged Russian assistance to Iran’s ballistic missile programs.

One of my sources at the time was a Russian diplomat, ostensibly a press officer, who offered hard information on the Russian companies helping Iran that he said had been presented by the Russian government to Vice President Al Gore.

I suspected my “source” was an intelligence officer. But I was able to corroborate his information and found it to be genuine—if embarrassing to Al Gore, who was trying to downplay Russia’s involvement in Iran.

I was not terribly surprised when I got a call from an FBI agent, who asked to meet me in a public park in Georgetown. He proceeded to tell me that the Russian was an intelligence officer the FBI was keeping tabs on, and that I should be careful about his efforts to cultivate me.

I thanked the agent, and promised to let him know if the Russian ever pumped me for information (he did not). The Russian was later targeted by the FBI in March 2001 for his alleged involvement in the Robert Hansen case and quietly left the United States before he could be expelled.

That’s how the FBI is supposed to work. Under Jim Comey and his merry band of partisan hacks, it went woefully astray.