2016 Presidential Election
August 19, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The mind-boggling scandal of the Obama administration’s treatment of the Trump presidential campaign continues to unravel, but you’d never know from taking in your news via the mainstream media. Former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr is scheduled to testify under oath this week before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees on August 28. Ohr seems to have served as a conduit for Christopher Steele’s continued service to the FBI
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August 18, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The confidence of the oleaginous Mark Warner in his colleague Richard Burr gives me my doubts. Burr is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who has kept up a bipartisan vibe in the committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the election. The parallel House committee operating under Chairman Devin Nunes has filed its Report on Russian Active Measures. Burr’s committee labors on. I have my doubts about Burr, but
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August 18, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Holman Jenkins finds press coverage of the origin of the FBI counterintelligence investigation wanting. Today he elaborates on this theme in his Wall Street Journal column “The press abets a coverup.” The counterintelligence investigation has been taken over by Robert Mueller. Mueller is to unravel the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with the friends of Vladimir Putin. One problem, if the Steele Dossier os taken at face value: only the Clinton
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August 16, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Today the New York Times has published a column by John Brennan under the headline “President Trump’s Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash.” Brennan served as Director of the CIA until January 2017 and held the highest security clearance until yesterday. He must know what he is talking about. Looking for the goods, I turn to his column. Here is the nub of the column: The already challenging work of
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August 14, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Anyone who bothered to read the transcript of Glenn Simpson’s testimony and absorb its contents would have been left with deep suspicions about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting of Donald Trump, Jr. and campaign officials with the connected Russian lawyer. The Russian lawyer met with Simpson before and after the meeting for some reason or other. Now Lee Smith puts the pieces of the puzzle together in an excellent
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August 13, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports that the FBI has fired Peter Strzok, the anti-Trump man who assured his FBI girlfriend that “we’ll stop” Trump from being president. The FBI’s inspector general concluded that Strzok showed a “willingness to take official action” to hurt Trump’s electoral prospects. Though the inspector general went no further, there is reason to believe that Strzok acted on this “willingness.” Strzok was escorted out of the FBI
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August 12, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Devin Nunes called in to speak from the republic of Georgia to speak with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Sunday Morning Futures show this morning. The interview previews the testimony of former United States associate deputy attorney general regarding his communications with Christopher Steele after the FBI had supposedly terminated its relationship with him. John Solomon and Byron York have covered the latest revelations regarding Ohr’s involvement in the
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August 10, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll has a few thoughts on what WHAT TO TELL OUR DAUGHTERS ABOUT THE ELECTION. She writes: I was browsing in Walmart’s meager book department and chanced to spy a slim volume called Madam President. Bwahahaha! I skimmed it in about 15 seconds. I am affirmatively uninterested in GENERAL in voting for someone simply on the basis of the color or shape of xer skin. Specifically, I was not
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August 8, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Byron York reports: Emails in 2016 between former British spy Christopher Steele and Justice Department official Bruce Ohr suggest Steele was deeply concerned about the legal status of a Putin-linked Russian oligarch, and at times seemed to be advocating on the oligarch’s behalf, in the same time period Steele worked on collecting the Russia-related allegations against Donald Trump that came to be known as the Trump dossier. The emails show
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August 5, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The New York Times breathlessly reports: “President Admits Focus of Trump Tower Meeting Was Getting Dirt on Clinton.” But in portraying this “admission” as news, the Times is playing fast and loose with the English language. In the process, it is dishing out fake news. What Trump acknowledged was that “this was a meeting to get information on an opponent.” In other words, the purpose of holding the meeting, from
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August 3, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Because Christopher Steele, author of the bogus anti-Trump dossier, supplied confidential information to the media, the FBI formally terminated him as a source. Therefore, FBI personnel were not supposed to accept information from him. But Byron York reports that the FBI continued to use Steele as a source. In fact, it did so on 12 separate occasions: [The FBI] devis[ed] a system in which Steele spoke regularly with Bruce Ohr,
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August 3, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The new issue of the Weekly Standard was published today. It carries no editorial explanation for the discrepancy between executive editor Fred Barnes’s excellent profile of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and the disgraceful cover story disparaging Nunes by one April Doss in the previous issue. I wrote at some length about that disgraceful cover story in part 3 of this series. Although the new issue lacks an explanation
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July 27, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The release of a heavily-redacted version of the FBI’s application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to wiretap Carter Page triggered a debate over whether the FBI gave the FISA court judges enough information to assess the anti-Trump motives of the people behind the Steele dossier. That dossier was at the core of the FBI’s application. Defenders of the FBI point to a footnote in the FISA application with
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July 26, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The New York Times has posted an extremely detailed map of the 2016 presidential election. It reflects the results of the election by county and includes a few interactive features. Click through the link above to check it out. The map is of course overwhelmingly red, reflecting Republican dominance by area rather than population. Taking a look at blue Minnesota, for example, where Hillary Clinton narrowly defeated Donald Trump by
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July 24, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he believes there were “sound reasons” for judges to approve the FISA warrant on former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. Burr denies that the FISA application filed by the Justice Department “came up short.” It seems to me that there are two distinct questions raised by the FISA application. First, did it provide sufficient basis, on its face,
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July 23, 2018 — Scott Johnson
I hold with Byron York that the release of the heavily redacted FISA warrant application documents on Carter Page have vindicated Devin Nunes. By the same token, Andrew McCarthy now judges that the documents disgrace the FBI. As always, Andy knows what he is talking about. His must-read NR column is “FISA Applications Confirm: The FBI Relied on the Unverified Steele Dossier.” With the skills of a natural teacher who
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July 22, 2018 — Scott Johnson
We are familiar with the Friday afternoon document dump. It’s a standard tool of political scandal management. What are we to make of the Saturday night document dump by which the Department of Justice delivered the heavily redacted documents comprising the Carter Page FISA warrant application to the New York Times and other news organizations that had sought them under the Freedom of Information Act? Charlie Savage’s New York Times
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