Via Epoch News:

UPDATE – AG Barr to declassify documents implicating Obama White House on illegal spying:

On Mueller’s little press show today; “I could not clear the President” – A prosecutor never “clears” anyone period stop, as that is not how the law works or was ever intended.

A prosecutor decides if there is enough evidence to act on or not. Of course Mueller found no evidence of collusion with Russia and Trump as his report says. This nonsense of his about “could not clear” is simply to use innuendo to imply guilt.

Always remember that “innocence” is assumed and implied until proven otherwise beyond reasonable doubt.

Get this, if Mueller found any evidence of Democrat, FBI/DoJ/CIA wrongdoing or knew about the bogus FISA Court applications and did nothing about them then HE is guilty of obstruction.

To make sure this wild train of abuses never happens again, when the FISA Applications are declassified in coming weeks I think he should be charged as I believe the evidence will be there that he knew. He should be charged not just for reasons of justice, but to help ensure that the Special Prosecutor statute never be used as a part of a coup attempt ever again.

Former Federal Prosecutor Fred Tucce:

Quite frankly, I find Mr. Mueller’s comments reprehensible. The part that bothers me the most is the bedrock for our system of justice is that people are presumed innocent unless proven otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt… I think what he did today really was one of the most political things I’ve ever seen a prosecutor do and I am deeply disappointed in the Justice Department for his conduct… These comments are nothing more than chum in the water for Democrats.

UPDATE – Former Federal Prosecutor Sydney Powell speaks out:

Democrats say time and time again that the Trump Administration is engaged in a cover up even though less than 2% of the Mueller Report is redacted and must be under Rule 6E stating that Grand Jury testimony must be kept secret. Even so certain Democrat Members of Congress with the proper clearance can go to view the redactions, most have chosen not to while still claiming a cover up.

It is widely believed via leaks, whistleblowers and the previously released FISA Court documents that at least three of the four applications that the DoJ/FBI under Obama made to the FISA Court in order to get surveillance of the Trump campaign approved were fraudulent; in short they lied to the court to get approval. Trump is making those applications and associating documents public. Democrats are having a conniption fit.

So now, making more details about the investigation public is somehow part of the cover up, at least according to Democrats:

The Hill:

Researchers have identified what they are calling a coordinated campaign to undermine President Trump on Instagram, an effort that bears hallmarks of the disinformation campaigns that proliferated on the platform in 2016.

A recently published study by Italian analytics firm Ghost Data identified a network of 350 anti-Trump accounts coordinating efforts to promote messages deriding the president, sometimes with graphic or violent language. The researchers found 19 suspicious Instagram accounts that took the lead in promoting anti-Trump content.

In total, the posts from the accounts generated have more than 35.2 million interactions, with 3.9 million of those interactions occurring in the last two months. The study concluded that the anti-Trump Instagram campaign has ramped up over the past several months, with the network’s activities swelling “dramatically” since April.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/444597-researchers-find-campaign-on-instagram-to-undermine-trump

Social Justice Warriors are in denial of reality and human nature. Their borish, post modernist race to the mediocre virtue signalling is not fun and more importantly it is not honest.

Here is the Luke we should have been treated to in the new Star Wars trilogy. “Missed opportunity” hardly seems adequate. Enjoy:

Declassified News has this complete home run of a video explaining what is going on with the elite media:

The elite media loves a good hoax so long as it smears a Republican or someone who is otherwise a threat to the progressive secular left.

In 2008 Sarah Palin enjoyed top ratings by her voters, she drew massive crowds, and she  energized the party like no other has since Ronald Reagan. She had also given what many believe was the most effective Convention Speech in recent memory. So of course the Democrats and their elite media allies set out to destroy her with lies, false quotes that were simply made up, carefully edited videos to make her look foolish etc..

The worst phoney accusation by far was that Sarah Palin’s most recent pregnancy was faked and that the baby really belonged to her teen daughter Bristol.

Sarah bounced back from her pregnancy quickly and was simply in peak physical form. Sarah and her husband Todd are both very athletic with Todd being a professional Iditerod and snowmachine racer.

To explain it and in order to further their smear campaign against Palin, Democrats and the elite media simply made this scandal up and insisted it was true in spite of scientific evidence to the contrary. Some in the elite media were “continuing the investigation” well in to 2014. So much for “leaving the kids of candidates alone” which only seems to be in effect when Democrats are in power.

Many who believe the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC truly believed that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy to protect her daughter and the campaign. To this day many Democrats still believe it, just as they believe that Sarah Palin said that she can see Russia from her house (she never said this). Other hoaxes that were widely reported about Sarah Palin are that she has affairs with NBA stars, she banned books from the Wasilla Library while she was Mayor. Palin wasn’t alone in such reporting at the New York Times reported, on the day he won the GOP nomination, that he had an affair with a young lobbyist. A hoax. It was completely made up.

Yet, most Democrats who watch CNN and MSNBC still believe that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the election even though this has been debunked as the most investigated hoax in American History.

RIP Doris Day, one of the most talented entertainers ever. To this day almost no one can measure up. Was she the very last of the greats?

Please forward the video to 1:35

As most Political Arena readers are aware, the US Government under the Obama Administration spied on many reporters, including veteran CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson.

When Attkisson was reporting on President Bush she was a hero, when she reported on President Obama accurately she became a pariah and CBS, under pressure from Democrats, willingly stopped airing her work.

The Obama Administration illegally hacked CBS’s computers, hacked Sharyl Attkisson’s computers and likely put her home under electronic surveillance. After CBS admitted they were hacked, their protest ended there. Does anyone believe that if Trump or Bush had done this CBS would have just let this go so easily?

Since CBS bailed on Attkisson (a warning to other reporters who would dare report accurately about the wrongdoing of any powerful Democrat), she is suing on her own and raising money to fund the lawsuit by herself.

Since filing her lawsuit the DoJ and “intelligence community” have directly violated court ordered discovery and have been hiding evidence in violation of the law for years.

Even appellate court judges have been compromised as two of them actually had the temerity to rule that the fact that the government would not comply with court orders and violated discovery was Sharyl Attkisson’s fault – you read that correctly. Attkisson is appealing that court’s Wilson Fisk like ruling to the higher en-banc appeals court.

Senator Charles Schumer had a warning for those who would take on the “intelligence community” as Sharyl is:

Wisely, Attkisson has found a television gig on a smaller network and works hard to keep a high public profile because just keeping it real, people have been victims of Arkanside for a lot less.

Watch for yourself…..

And this is why Avery Brooks, is well Avery Brooks. He played Captain Benjamin Lafayette Sisko on Star Trek, Deep Space Nine.

The pinheads running Lucasfilm and Star Trek Discovery are now learning the hard way what Brooks explained here.

Below is one of his finest moments in Star Trek. Please watch the videos as they auto-load in order:

Below is a letter from Emmet Flood, the Special Counsel to the President. It explains in great detail how the content Special Prosecutor Mueller’s report, broke rules of procedure, DoJ Rules, the special counsel statute and the cooperation agreement Mueller made with the White House.

Much of what is said mirrors what we have said in our postings here at PoliticalArena; namely that:

1 – There is no such thing as a declaration of “innocent” in our legal system

2 – Mueller was tasked with making a determination to prosecute or not and explain why he did or did not to the Attorney General. Mueller actively refused to do just that. Instead he left it “open” for others” as a giant political hot potato. That is not the job of a prosecutor.

3 – As part of the agreement the Special Counsel had with the White House, the White House would not claim executive privilege and would cooperate with the investigation, so long and Mueller and his team kept such privileged information, interviews and personal information. Instead, Mueller published almost all of it in volume II of his report including political, law enforcement, personal, and process information that has no business being released to the public.

Please read the entire letter below carefully and deliberately. 

===================================================================

THE  WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON

April 19. 2019

Via Hand Delivery

The Honorable William P. Barr Attorney General of the United States United States Department of Justice 950 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W. Washington D.C. 20530

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

I write on behalf of the Office of the President to memorialize concerns relating to the form of the Special Counsel’s Office (“SCO”) Report (‘”SCO Report” or “Report”) and to address executive privilege issues associated with its release.

The SCO Report suffers from an extraordinary legal defect: It quite deliberately fails to comply with the requirements of governing law. Lest the Report’s release be taken as a ” precedent” or perceived as somehow legitimating the defect, I write with both the President and future Presidents in mind to make the following points clear.

I begin with the SCO’s stated conclusion on the obstruction question: The SCO concluded that the evidence “prevent[ed] [it] from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred.” SCO Report v.2, p.2. But “conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred” was not the SCO’s assigned task, because making conclusive determinations of innocence is never the task of the federal prosecutor.

What prosecutors are supposed to do is complete an investigation and then either ask the grand jury to return an indictment or decline to charge the case. When prosecutors decline to charge, they make that decision not because they have “conclusively determined that no criminal conduct occurred,” but rather because they do not believe that the investigated conduct constitutes a crime for which all the elements can be proven to the satisfaction of a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Prosecutors simply are not in the business of establishing innocence, any more than they are in the business of “exonerating” investigated persons. In the American justice system, innocence is presumed; there is never any need for prosecutors to ” conclusively determine” it. Nor is there any place for such a determination. Our country would be a very different (and very dangerous) place if prosecutors applied the SCO standard and citizens were obliged to prove “conclusively . . . that no criminal conduct occurred.”

Because they do not belong to our criminal justice vocabulary, the SCO’s inverted-proof­ standard and “exoneration” statements can be understood only as political statements, issuing from persons (federal prosecutors) who in our system of government are rightly expected never to be political in the performance of their duties. The inverted burden of proof knowingly embedded in the SCO ‘ s conclusion shows that the Special Counsel and his staff failed in their duty to act as prosecutors and only as prosecutors.

Second, and equally importantly: In closing its investigation, the SCO had only one job – to ‘·provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.’. 28 C.F.R. § 600.S(c). Yet the one thing the SCO was obligated to do is the very thing the SCO – intentionally and unapologetically ­ refused to do. The SCO made neither a prosecution decision nor a declination decision on the obstruction question. Instead, it transmitted a 182-page discussion of raw evidentiary material combined with its own inconclusive observations on the arguable legal significance of the gathered content. As a result , none of the Report’s Volume 11 complied with the obligation imposed by the governing regulation to explain the prosecution or declination decisions reached.” Id.

The SCO instead produced a prosecutorial curiosity – part ”truth commission” report and part law school exam paper.  Far more detailed than the text of any known criminal indictment or declination memorandum, the Report is laden with factual information that has never been subjected to adversarial testing or independent analysis. That information is accompanied by  a series of inexplicably inconclusive observations (inexplicable, that is, coming from a prosecutor) concerning possible applications of law to fact. This species of public report has no basis in the relevant regulation and no precedent in the history of special/independent counsel investigations .

An investigation of the President under a regulation that clearly specifies a very particular form of closing documentation is not the place for indulging creative departures from governing law. Under general prosecutorial principles, and under the Special Counsel regulation’s specific language, prosecutors are to speak publicly through indictments or confidentially in declination memoranda. By way of justifying this departure, it has been suggested that the Report was written with the intent of providing Congress some  kind of ‘roadmap’ for congressional action.  See,e.g., Remarks of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, 4/18 /19 (Press Conference). (1) If that was in fact the SCO’s intention, it too serves as additional evidence of the SCO’s refusal to follow applicable law. Both the language of the regulation and its “‘legislative ” history make plain that the ‘·[c]losing documentation” language was promulgated for the specific purpose of preventing the creation of this sort of final report. (2) Under a constitution of separated powers, inferior Article II officers should not be in the business of creating ‘road maps” for the purpose of transmitting them to Article I committees.

With the release of the SCO Report, and despite all of the foregoing, the President has followed through on his consistent promise of transparency. He encouraged every White House staffer to cooperate fully with the SCO and, so far as we are aware, all have done so. Voluntary interviewees included the Counsel to the President, two Chiefs of Staff, the Press Secretary and numerous others. In addition, approximately 1.4 million pages of documents were provided to the SCO. This voluntary cooperation was given on the understanding (reached with the SCO) that information (i) gathered directly from the White House or White House staffers and (ii) having to do with Presidential communications, White House deliberations, law enforcement information, and perhaps other matter may be subject to a potential claim of executive privilege and, for that reason, would be treated by the SCO as presumptively privileged.  Volume II of the report contains a great deal of presumptively privileged information, largely in the form of references to, and descriptions of, White House staff interviews with the SCO. It also includes reference to presumptively privileged documentary materials.

The President is aware that, had he chosen to do so, he could have withheld such information on executive privilege grounds, basing such an assertion on the established principle that to permit release of such information might have a chilling effect on a President’s advisors, causing them to be less than fully frank in providing advice to a President. Notwithstanding his right to assert such a privilege, and with a measure of reluctance born of concern for future Presidents and their advisors, the President has in this instance elected not to assert executive privilege over any of the presumptively privileged portions of the report. As a consequence, not a single redaction in the Report was done on the advice of or at the direction of the White House.

The President therefore wants the following features of his decision to be known and understood:

• His decision not to assert privilege is not a waiver of executive privilege for any other material or for any other purpose;
• His decision to permit disclosure of executive-privileged portions of the report does not waive any privileges or protections for the SCO’ s underlying investigative materials such as, for example, FBI Form 302 witness interview summaries and presumptively privileged documents made available to the SCO by the White House.
• His decision does not affect his ability as President  to  instruct  his advisors to decline to appear before congressional committees  to  answer  questions  on  these same subjects. It is one thing for a President to encourage complete cooperation and transparency in a criminal investigation  conducted  largely within the  Executive Branch; it is  something  else entirely  to allow  his advisors to  appear  before Congress, a coordinate branch of government, and answer questions relating to their communications with the President and with each other. The former course reflected the President’s recognition of the importance  of  promoting  cooperation  with  a criminal investigation. The latter course creates profound separation  of  powers concerns and- if not defended aggressively – threatens to undermine the integrity of Executive Branch deliberations. The President is determined to protect from congressional scrutiny not only the advice rendered by his own advisors, but also by advisors to future Presidents.

A great deal is said these days about the rule of law and the importance of legal norms. In that spirit, and mindful of the frenzied atmosphere accompanying the Report’s release, the following should not be forgotten. Government officials, with access to classified information derived from a counterintelligence investigation and from classified intelligence intercepts, engaged in a campaign of illegal leaks against the President. Many of those leaks were felonies.

They disclosed the identity of a U.S. person in violation of his civil rights; they misused intelligence for partisan political purposes; and they eroded public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of our intelligence services. The criminal investigation began with a breach of confidentiality executed by a very senior administration official who was himself an intelligence service chief.  This leak of confidential information, personally directed by the former Director of the FBI, triggered the creation of the SCO itself – precisely as he intended it to do.

Not so long ago, the idea that a law enforcement official might provide the press with confidential governmental information for the proclaimed purpose of prompting a criminal investigation of an identified individual would have troubled Americans of all political persuasions. That the head of our country’s top law enforcement agency has actually done so to the President of the United States should frighten every friend of individual liberty. Under our system of government, unelected Executive Branch officers and intelligence agency personnel are supposed to answer to the person elected by the people – the President – and not the other way around. This is not a Democratic or a Republican issue; it is a matter of having a government responsible to the people – and, again, not the other way around. In the partisan commotion surrounding the released Report, it would be well to remember that what can be done to a President can be done to any of us.

These leaks and this investigation also caused immense and continuing interference with the functioning of the Executive Branch. Our constitution makes the President the sole constitutional officer for whom the entire Nation votes, and [who] represent[s] the entire Nation both domestically and abroad.” Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681, 711 (1997) (Breyer, J., concurring). As a result, ‘interference with a President ‘s ability to carry out his public responsibilities is constitutionally equivalent to interference with the ability of the entirety of Congress, or the Judicial Branch, to carry out its public obligations.” Id. at 713. It is inarguable that the now-resolved allegation of ·’Russian collusion” placed a cloud over the Presidency that has only begun to lift in recent weeks. The pendency of the SCO investigation plainly interfered with the President’s ability to carry out his public responsibility to serve the American people and to govern effectively. These very public and widely felt consequences flowed from, and were fueled by, improper disclosures by senior government officials with access to classified information. That this continues to go largely unremarked should worry all civil libertarians, all supporters of investigative due process, and all believers in limited and effective government under the Constitution.

I respectfully ask you to include a copy of this letter in the Department’s records relating to the SCO investigation.

Sincerely

Emmet T. Flood

Special Counsel to the President

================================================================

As readers may recall, FBI Lead investigator Peter Strzok and FBI DoJ Attorney Lisa Page spoke in their text messages and emails how the FBI was setting up an “insurance policy” in case Donald Trump won the election.

George Papadopoulos was a junior foreign policy consultant in the Trump campaign. His area of expertise is Middle Eastern/Mediterranean studies, Israel and energy.

Papadopoulos had already been on the Obama Administration’s radar in a bad way for his support of Israeli energy independence and his opposition to the Iran deal and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey. The Obama Administration was growing cozy with elements of the Muslim Brotherhood and President Erdogan of Turkey who is more sympathetic to militant Islam.

Papadopoulos was targeted by at least three FBI/CIA assets/agents that we know of in an attempt to entrap him and make it appear that Papadopoulos was a Russian Intelligence asset, this giving the FBI/Obama Administration the excuse to get a FISA wiretap warrant against him and this spy on nut just him, but most of the Trump Campaign through him.

EDITOR’S NOTE: When the FBI or CIA want to spy on a VIP illegally,  they do not target said person directly as that raises the chance of getting caught, leaks etc. So they find an obscure person, one or two orbits removed from said VIP and use that person as the central spying target on paper, and then anyone he associates with and then anyone associated with that group of people until the real target is being surveilled. The government will then abuse “unmasking requests” (of those “incidentally” targeted /wink /wink) to reveal information on the target VIP and those around him.

UPDATE – Make that at least FOUR FBI/CIA assets – Attorney General William Barr revealed during his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer was an FBI source for information about George Papadopoulos.

So while Papadopoulos was invited to talk to FBI/CIA asset Joseph Misfud in Rome, who presented himself as a Russian agent working for Putin who had dirt on Hillary to give to Papadopoulos; on the backside FBI/CIA assets Prof. Stefan A. Halper and a curvy seductress known as Azra Turk who worked to ahem….”coax” Papadopoulos into saying that he was getting information for the Trump Campaign from the Russians. In short, textbook entrapment.

It seems that Ms. Turk was a little too obvious and Papadopoulos was able to put “two & two” together. The Mueller Report falsely labels Joseph Misfud as a Russian asset and thus is a part of the justification used to get FISA warrants on the Trump Campaign.

MSN has a great piece on Stefan Halper and Azra Turk – F.B.I. Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to Meet With Trump Aide in 2016.

More on Misfud – Devin Nunes: How Many Spies (With An “S”) Did Obama Administration Target At Trump Campaign?

More on Misfud’s ties to the Clinton State Department – Devin Nunes: Clinton ‘dirt’ tipster Joseph Mifsud has ties to State Department.

Mueller Report hid information on Misfud – Nunes: Mueller report ‘cherry-picked’ information about mysterious Maltese Professor Mifsud.

EDITOR’S NOTE – The DNC talking point against George Papadopoulos is “Papadopoulos plead guilty to lying to the FBI so he isn’t trustworthy”. What they fail to say is that in his voluntary testimony to Robert Mueller that he simply got a date wrong. Robert Mueller threw the book at Papadopoulos, his staff tried to convince his wife to leave him and also threatened to prosecute him under the FARA Act for his position on Israeli and South East Mediterranean energy independence.

Papadopoulos did not have the resources to pay the lawyers to fight these false charges even though he was innocent, so he accepted 16 days in jail as a plea bargain.