Morning Bulletin
By
Paul E Vallely MG, US Army (Ret)
ANOTHER Document Shames the FBI for “Conduct Unbecoming”
Guest Editorial: Real Clear Investigations
May 20, 2023
The civil rights abuses carried out by the FBI since 2016 — 2015 are motivated primarily by a seething hatred of Donald Trump. So why should even those conservatives and middle-of-the-roaders who don’t wear MAGA hats and attend Trump rallies be all that concerned about this? Maybe their relentless trashing of the Constitution was just an aberration that will blow over when President Trump walks away from politics. Maybe things will finally return to normal with Trump no longer in the mix.
Don’t fool yourself. As long as we “extremist MAGA Republicans” (translation: Republicans) exist, the entrenched bureaucracy will be pulling out all the stops to keep us from putting on our white hoods and doing whatever it is white supremacists who supposedly do in 2023. (These days, Jim Crow-style segregation is promoted only by the left. I digress.) Mostly, of course, they want to stop us from voting Republican. They might no longer be targeting Trump, but they’ll still be out to get whoever takes his place, with half the country as collateral damage. Nothing will change.
Here’s one indication of what can and will continue to go wrong if changes aren’t made: A document from the FISA Court unsealed Friday shows that the FBI misused Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) more than 278,000 times (!) in the year ending November 2021, “including against crime victims, January 6 riot suspects, and people arrested at protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020.”
They also misused it to spy on 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate. It’s unclear who that former candidate is, but FOX NEWS says this person wasn’t a member of Congress and did not win the election. (Who’s to tell if the outcome would have been the same without their involvement?) Just think, whenever you give to a candidate, you can’t be sure that the FBI isn’t scooping up your electronic communications.
Section 702 allows the government to conduct targeted surveillance of (“SPY ON”) foreign persons outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence. The FBI can compel electronic communication service providers such as ATT to assist them. As reported by AMERICAN GREATNESS, “The law, created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, allows National Security Agency [NSA] and FBI employees to search a vast database of electronic communications and other information.”
Agents should search the 702 databases only if they have reason to think that doing so will provide needed foreign intelligence or evidence of crimes.
The FISA Court now says the FBI has shown “a pattern of conducting broad, suspicionless queries” beyond these limits. Can you say, “fishing expedition”?
A senior FBI official told FOX NEWS that these abuses are “completely unacceptable” blah blah blah. They claim to have changed their “querying procedure,” so this will never happen again, adding, “We are committing to continuing this work and providing greater transparency into the process to earn the trust of the American people and advance our mission of safeguarding both the nation’s security and privacy and civil liberties, at the same time.”
Well, that’s good enough for me! They’re wasting their breath. “Civil liberties” means the same standard of ‘justice’ for all. After seeing the Durham Report’s comparison of the Trump and Hillary investigations, they are untrustworthy. Sadly, the pinky swear of the FBI means nothing to me at this point, and I’ll bet it means nothing to you, either.
(The Durham Report revealed that the FBI dropped FOUR active criminal investigations of alleged attempts to influence the Clintons via donations to Hillary’s campaign and the Clinton Foundation in the 2016 election. Have they ever dropped an investigation of Trump, even when they knew it was based on fake evidence they manufactured themselves?)
Greater transparency is the last thing they want. We JUST SAW the testimony from whistleblowers who, for trying to provide transparency, were suspended without pay and deprived of their security clearances.
The big question is, “What will it take to rein in the FBI? Do we need to tear it down and start over?” That certainly should be on the table, but in the meantime, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, says the FISA law, which “sunsets” on December 31 of this year, should be allowed to expire.
RELATED: They say that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. According to investigative reporter Peter Schweizer, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee has subpoenaed the phone records of a phone belonging to President Biden that Hunter Biden’s business paid for while his dad was VP. (Unlike the FBI, at least Congress got a subpoena.) The phone’s contents are “going to yield much interesting information as to whom Joe Biden was talking to on this phone that was being paid for by his son,” he said.
Also, Schweizer is quite disturbed by the firing of the IRS team looking into Hunter’s financial improprieties. He thinks what happened to the investigators is potentially illegal as well.
AND THIS: More from the Durham Report — Here’s a blast from the past: Remember Bruce and Nellie Ohr? Bruce Ohr was a very high-up ‘Justice’ Department official — third in command if memory serves — married to Nellie Ohr, who just happened to work at Fusion GPS (!) as an open-source researcher with a specialty in all things Russia. The foundation for much fiction in the Steele “dossier” came from the material she put together.
During his investigation, Durham obtained the reports she had done for Fusion GPS. In a series of at least 12 reports, she had zeroed in on Sergei Millian and stories about his connections to Russia and Trump, which turned out to be false (Millian sued), but so what?
Instead of re-telling the story of Nellie and Bruce Ohr and the Steele “dossier,” I’ll ask you to read this excellent summary at REALCLEAR INVESTIGATIONS. The role played by Nellie Ohr in creating the “dossier’s” central claims is much more significant than we know until now. The material wasn’t the high-quality “Crown material” of a British ex-spy, as the FBI had insisted it was. The “dossier” was nothing of the kind, and they were aware; it carried the name of a British ex-spy, Christopher Steele, but was the brainchild of Fusion GPS, a political oppo research company paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign through her attorneys at Democrat powerhouse legal firm Perkins Coie.
In other words, it was a sham.
There’s also quite a bit here about Fusion GPS promoting the phony Alfa Bank story in the media. For this, they sought the assistance of Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann. So even though Durham didn’t get a conviction in the Sussmann case, the discovery phase of that trial was invaluable in obtaining information about everything the various Hillary cronies were doing to help her frame Trump. All roads lead back to Hillary.
Released and Distributed by the Stand Up America US Foundation
