Playing Catchup: Russia Hoax, Psychopaths In Government, And More

Let’s start with old friend, Dan Bongino. If you follow the link below you’ll find a 5+ minute video in which Dan addresses the report that the CIA affirmatively tasked fellow Five Eye intel agencies to spy on 26 Donald Trump associates, probably beginning in 2015 at the latest, and to provide their take to the FBI and other US agencies. We can take it for granted that that tasking included the equivalent of FISA coverage—we addressed that yesterday and will add a bit to that discussion today. It also included personal approaches that could be used to make claims of “suspicious” activity on the part of Trump associates. Think George Papadopoulos , Carter Page, and more. Here’s the transcript that I’ve made. You may not agree with every take that Bongino has, but it’s stimulating. Maybe it has to do with my background, but I like the way he frames the FISA operation. That’s largely my view, as well:

https://twitter.com/oldschoolethos/status/1757902958329475147

Forced Awakening @oldschoolethos

We are in so much trouble it’s hard to process or wrap your head around.

Dan broke down all of the Ukrainegate & Spygate story very well in today’s podcast. He has been covering it for a long time like many others.

He covers the ties between Obama, Clinton, CIA & other Intelligence Agencies, Foreign intelligence, Ukraine, Soros, FISA Warrant,…

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Folks, every one of the stories and scandals I'm about to address in this next sentence or two, every one of them, it's all the same story. I have been telling you this for years. There is absolutely no difference between the Ukraine story going on now, the Mar-a-Lago raid, the effort to paper over the scandal with FISA, the Collusion Hoax, Spygate, the Impeachment Hoax, and the Biden document scandal. It is all the same thing! And it is this: They spied on Donald Trump--and others, by the way. They spied on Donald Trump using foreign actors. One of those foreign actors who assisted in the plot to take down Donald Trump was the Ukrainian government. The Ukrainian government was deeply involved in the effort to spy on and take down Donald Trump. The Ukrainians know about this. Joe Biden was knee deep in Ukraine in a business operation in Ukraine while Barack Obama and his people were using Ukraine to spy on Donald Trump.

The spying operation on Donald Trump--there are documents that Michael Schellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag say exist in a binder. It is something I heard about, they confirmed, I give them all the credit in the world, but we addressed it in the show. The raid on Mar-a-Lago was an effort to get rid of that intelligence--to go find it and make it go away.

The FISA operation, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court [FISC] operation to spy on Donald Trump was the insurance policy, ladies and gentlemen. It was nothing more than an effort to paper over what was a John Brennan, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama effort to spy on Donald Trump. The FISA operation was just nothing more than an effort to put paper behind it and put the patina, the coating, of morality and ethical behavior.

Now, Bongino has a very specific argument going on here, but without a background in FISA it’s easy to miss it. Let’s unpack that, before getting back to Dan.

Start with the fact that the FBI simply didn’t have a legal justification to get FISA coverage on those 26 Trump associates. Even the FISA on Paul Manafort had lapsed and presumably couldn’t be renewed. The clock to the election was running and the US Intel Community (USIC) needed “actionable” intel on the Trump campaign, so Brennan got the UK’s GCHQ to do what we called ELSUR—electronic surveillance.

Here’s the catch. Almost certainly, none of the foreign government information that the USIC obtained would be usable in a US court. At some point the USIC needed to set up its own FISA on someone in the Trump campaign. Which brings us to another major catch. To get a FISA on a US person (USPER) requires probable cause that 1) the person was involved in clandestine intelligence activity for a foreign power, and 2) that clandestine intelligence activity has to be tied to a criminal violation under US law.

Those requirements are not that easy to satisfy. For example, just meeting with, say, a Russian intel officer does not constitute clandestine activity, nor is it a criminal violation. Trying to frame a target on something like this, based on activity in the US, is pretty tough, because if it ever goes public it can be checked. This is why Carter Page’s trip to Moscow to give a graduation address at some institute was a godsend for the USIC. It allowed them to claim—based on sensitive sources that could never be revealed—that Page had engaged in “secret meetings” with Putin associates, without fear of contradiction. It also allowed for a claim that Page was the conduit between Putin and Trump. The key here is that, if any checking were done on the narrative, sure enough, it would turn out that Page had been in Moscow, lending at least a surface claim that the allegation was believed in good faith.

As I wrote yesterday, I’ve long suspected that the Russian invitation to Carter Page might have been set up through the instigation of a Western intel service—one that was fully cognizant of FISA requirements. All these items appeared in the Steele “dossier”. Coincidence that they fullfilled those very specific FISA requirements? You’ll never get me to believe that. Seeing all those coincidences showing up in source reporting, which appear to be predicated on a specialist understanding of FISA, was enough to convince me there was no coincidence. The additional interesting question is whether, if this is true, the Russians knew what was going on, or to what degree?

It was a fake, the whole time! The Collusion scandal was nothing more than a fairy tale invented by Hillary Clinton and advanced by John Brennan and useful idiot Jim Comey. The spying operation on Donald Trump was nothing more than an effort to set him up with a push-pull operation that I described years ago, where they kept pushing intel into the Trump team--fake intel--hoping they would suck it up so they could frame them for being involved with the Russians.

The Impeachment Hoax on Donald Trump only happened after Donald Trump started asking questions about Ukraine and their role in both Hunter Biden and their role to keep him [Trump] out of office. They impeached him for the phone call!

The Biden document scandal--the documents he was hiding were documents about Ukraine, who was knee deep in the Spygate scandal.

Folks, the Global Swamp is freaking out right now! Again, I'm gonna say their names right now because they deserve a lotta credit. Lotta people are freaking out today: 'I said this, I said that! [Who cares?] This is about uncovering the Deep State. Would you really give a sh*t who gets the credit? ... Taibbi, Schellenberger, and Gutentag have a new substack out with a new source that, yes, confirms a lot of what we knew, but the source is new! This is incredible! The Global Swamp is freaking out and the rats are jumping off the ship. Why? Because Donald Trump, after the Robert Hur letter and the hit from Obama in that letter. Obama's team was absolutely involved in this takedown of Biden--in that Robert Hur letter that [Biden]'s mentally incompetent--I'm sure of it! Whether Hur knows it or not.

They realize that Biden's done and that he's going to lose. Everyone is freaking out because they know that Trump's gonna get back into office and declassify--finally!--all of this sh*t, fire bureaucrats who get in the way, because he doesn't have to worry about re-election or anything else. And they are freaking out! Laws were broken! People committed crimes!

And what’s really got to have them freaking out is the realization that Kama Sutra stands in the way of replacing Zhou with a viable candidate. As we’ve discussed many times, there are no easy fixes to this problem. There is no constitional provision that would allow for some sort of switcheroo to get around a President Kama Sutra. There is not. There is no way around doing a deal with the House GOP. Yes, that could happen, but it’s not the way they would want it to happen. It’s a complete sh*t show in DC—same as ever, perhaps, but now it’s out there for all to see. In the meantime Zhou is burning the house down on both the foreign and domestic fronts, with every expectation of worse in the offing. “Everyone” has every reason to be freaking out.

Oh, and look at this! Conveniently this morning, a Dear Colleagues letter goes out to members of the House. Oh, folks--what a coincidence! The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has identified an urgent matter with regard to a destabilizing foreign military capability that should be known by all Congressional policy makers. Wow! Emergency meeting, Joe! We better renew FISA and spying authority--we got some emergency information.

What are the chances? Trust no one. They all hate you! You get what I'm telling you?

Now, here I have to take issue with Bongino regarding “renewing FISA and spying authority.” Long time readers will know that I’ve written at length on this topic. A lot of people think that FISA is what gave the FBI the authority to conduct electronic spying on American citizens. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that, in case after case—although none at the SCOTUS level—the federal courts have held that “wiretapping” for national security purposes is fundamentally different than in criminal cases and does require a warrant, despite what the 4th amendment might lead you to think. Those cases are still law. All FISA did was to establish some hoops for the FBI to jump through. In reality, the FBI was all for FISA because it was the perfect CYA law. As long as they followed the administrative procedures they knew that they would never get in really big trouble. And the Russia Hoax proved that they were right. Way back in 1976 Judge Robert Bork warned that that would be the outcome, and he was right, too. FISA, in a sense, preempted the SCOTUS, preventing it from settling the law. For political reasons the SCOTUS is afraid to take this on. But please trust me on this, failing to renew FISA might very well not change the situation, except to bring the whole issue back into court. Maybe that would be good, but maybe not. I haven’t heard anyone seriously address these issues.

Anyway, thank Trump for this. He woke us all up to what a mess America is in.

As it happens, Matt Hoh has a compelling explanation for why so much stuff is hitting the fan:

Doug Macgregor, too. Macgregor leads into the concluding segment here by observing that the same people who said Putin would never invade Ukraine—and that if he did he’d be defeated and deposed—are also the people saying that there will never be a regional war in the Middle East. He’s talking about the Jordanian king’s recent visit.

Let’s finish with a thought experiment. My wife has been reading book after book about the origins and development of the Deep State. From my post in front of my computer screen I keep hearing her jaw bouncing of the floor, and then she reads me the latest discovery of outrageous criminality and moral turpitude by the people who run America—as opposed, as President Putin told Tucker, to our elected “representatives”. My thought is simply this. Is it perhaps the case that the American people definitively lost control over their government during the Truman years? The idea is that Truman was in totally over his head, signed on to the idea of a Deep State, and that was all she wrote. It’s been going on ever since, and any president who got in the way, well …