Category Archives: FBI

Have You Met Andrii Telizhenko?

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So, we have the phone call whistle-blower, Eric Ciaramella visiting the Obama White House according to visitor logs an estimated 200 times. What?

Ciaramella held the positions of National Security Council director for Ukraine under Susan Rice and director of Baltic and Eastern European Affairs in the Office of Vice President Joe Biden. Ciaramella was advised by Adam Schiff’s staff to fill out a complaint on the Trump/Zelensky phone call and given the text of the complaint, it is obvious it was drafted by lawyers likely out of Schiff’s office, maybe even Daniel Goldman himself.

Coming from Senator Rand Paul’s Twitter feed is this little gem posted on January 16, 2020.

Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) | Twitterhttps://twitter.comType a message

Anyway, Eric Ciaramella hosted a particular meeting on January 16, 2016 in room 230A at the Obama White House to discuss Ukraine, especially Burisma and the ‘Bidens’. Eric Ciaramella also hosted and chaired a meeting in Room 374 of the Eisenhower Executive Office, which seems to be a planning session to re-open an investigation of Paul Manafort which was to review the information that Alexandra Chalupa had gathered on Manafort and she was paid by the DNC to do so.

Artem Sytnyk, the director of Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), a Soros group. Sytnyk was put on the public register of person who committed corrupt related crimes in Ukraine.

Others at the meeting included:

Jeffrey Cole: Resident Legal Advisor at U.S. Embassy, Ukraine (FBI)

Anna Iemelianova: Special Legal Counsel for the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine

Nazar Kholodnitsky: Ukraine’s Chief anti-corruption Prosecutor

Svitlana Pardus: Operations, DoJ, U.S. Embassy, Ukraine

David Sakvarelidze: Deputy General Prosecutor, fired in March of 2016

Andris Razans: Ambassador of Latvia in Belgium (important, read below)

Liz Zentos: National Security Council Director of Eastern Europe

Catherine L. Newcombe: Eurasia legal programs at the DoJ Criminal Division

This meeting was where the Ukraine corruption and the Biden/Burisma plot was launched to protect the infectious relationships.This meeting’s central objective was to tell Ukraine to no longer investigate/probe Burisma and to allow the FBI to take full control. Kiev did not agree and hence later Biden stepped in with his threat to withhold the $1 billion loan guarantees unless Ukraine complied.

Andrii Telizhenko was in that meeting too and has since been cooperating in full with Rudy Giuliani and is essentially a whistleblower.

My Dinner With Andrii | Talking Points Memo Andrii Telizhenko

Telizhenko was previously a political office in the Ukrainian embassy. Ukraine was financially desperate to follow all instructions put forth by the United States during the Obama administration and now is having to do the same with a new administration under President Trump and the new Ukraine president Zelensky for any kind of survival to maintain stability and not fall to Russian aggression or annexation.

Confusing right?

Then it seems the FBI did gain some control and curiously, a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General, John Buretta was hired to defend Burisma president Nikolay Zlochevskyi for income tax evasion and money-laundering. The truth be told, Burisma bought justice by agreeing to pay $7.4 million in back taxes and fines. Burisma can hire who they want and did but having Devon Archer and Hunter Biden on the Board did allow for political cover, access and favors.

In 2014, Prime Minister Theresa May held a summit for where leaders from a handful of countries attended to plot out a plan to provide Ukraine with some leadership guidance and financial assistance after the billions stolen by the former Ukraine president Yanukovich and others in the government from the coffers of the Ukrainian treasury and various banks. Over the years, in fact, hundreds of billions had been stolen…you read that right. Those monies traced to various countries and accounts (tax havens) around the world including South East Asia, the Caribbean, Cyprus, London, Latvia, Luxembourg, and even Liechtenstein.

One account held in a London bank belonged to Mykola Zlochevsky who at the time was not only the Ukraine Resource Minister but the CEO of Burisma. All the while, Russia had officially annexed Crimea and had immediate plans to do the same with Ukraine. Ukraine had no money to fight a war and needed immediate financial assistance from the International Monetary Fund and guidance from the United States, hence then President Obama assigned the Ukraine portfolio to Vice President Biden. Various banks around the world that could be attributed to belonging to Ukraine, or by corrupt oligarchs were frozen. This was to stop the bleeding and begin a full and comprehensive investigation by various financial fraud experts of Western nations.

It is no wonder that big print and cable news media is attacking Rudy Giuliani as he as Trump’s personally attorney and former prosecutor has been investigating all of this for a very long time and has a cache of tangible evidence. To complicate matters even more, we have Andrii Derkach who initiated the criminal case of the interference in the U.S. elections.

In part from a long Guardian article published on April 12, 2017:

On 19 January, the day before Trump’s inauguration, Zlochevsky’s gas company announced it was becoming a funder of the Atlantic Council, a prominent Washington thinktank. The Atlantic Council declined to say exactly how much money the tycoon had offered, only that his donation had been between $100,000 and $249,000. A month later, Burisma hired a new director. Joseph Cofer Black does not appear to have any more experience of Ukraine than his colleague Hunter Biden but – as an ex-ambassador and a former director of the CIA’s counterterrorism centre under George W Bush – he is likely to have lots of useful contacts in Washington.

Zlochevsky’s last public appearance was in June 2016 at a Burisma-organised alternative energy forum, co-hosted in Monaco by Prince Albert II, who made the keynote speech. Photographs of the event showed Hunter Biden posing with various comfortably retired ex-politicians, wearing a blue suit twinned with highly-polished brown shoes. Zlochevsky was tanned and healthy in an open-necked shirt, while a more formally dressed Prince Albert placed a solicitous hand on his back.

Perhaps there should be witnesses in the Trump impeachment trial in the Senate, in fact there should be 200-300 of them and not only should Hunter Biden and the whistleblower be among the witness list, but Eric Holder needs to be on the hot seat too.

Complicated…right?

 

Carter Page is Due Big Money, Manafort May Get Relief

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The FISA Court released a few days ago a ruling that at least 2 (the last 2) of the 4 secret surveillance applications against Carter Page were in valid. The first 2 applications are under review and may see the same ruling.

So, former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe are for sure on the legal hot seat as is Dana Boente. At the Department of Justice, at the time Rod Rosenstein had the final signature relying on the lower level FBI certifications of validations.
Carter Page has an excellent case now against the government for violations by the government for illegal search/surveillance/wire-tap(s) warrants and based on the timing, now in-prison Paul Manafort may have a case against the government as well. The Manafort case is not yet resolved based on timelines and use by the Mueller investigation.

This places more layers to the operatives in government perhaps as directed by the Democrat Party to use government power and people for explosive political missions. A new plateau of government collusion it seems.

The timing of this release appears to have some purpose and will affect the impeachment trial in the Senate where the Trump defense team may just use this information to their advantage and the House impeachment managers (Schiff/Nadler) and Speaker Pelosi will be working overtime to draft a twisted defense response.

Image result for fisa court carter page photo source/Forbes

Federalist: Authority granted to the federal government to secretly wiretap and spy on former Trump affiliate Carter Page was “not valid,” the nation’s top spy court noted in a secret ruling penned earlier this month. The order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which was created and authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), was initially signed and issued on January 7, 2020, but was not declassified and released until Thursday afternoon.

Judge James Boasberg, the current federal judge presiding over the FISA court, wrote in his order that at least two of the four FISA applications against Carter Page were unlawfully authorized. Additionally, according his order, the Department of Justice similarly concluded following the release of a sprawling investigate report on the matter by the agency’s inspector general that the government did not have probable cause that Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power. The FISA law states that American citizens cannot be secretly spied on by the U.S. government absent probable cause, based on valid evidence, that an American is unlawfully acting as a foreign agent.

“DOJ assesses that with respect to the applications in Docket Numbers 17-375 and 17-679, ‘if not earlier, there was insufficient predication to establish probable cause to believe that [Carter] Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power,’” Boasberg wrote, referring to the final two of the four FISA applications to spy on Page. “The Court understands the government to have concluded, in view of the material misstatements and omissions, that the Court’s authorizations in Docket Numbers 17-375 and 17-679 were not valid.”

Boasberg’s ruling noted that DOJ had not yet taken a position on the lawfulness of the first two applications against Page, but was currently collecting information to assess whether those two spy applications were also invalid. The invalid applications specified by Boasberg were dated April 7 and June 29 of 2017. The false and invalid April 7 application was personally signed by James Comey, while the false and invalid June 29 application was signed by Andrew McCabe. Both men were referred for criminal prosecution by the inspector general. Former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who is alleged to have offered to wear a wire against President Donald Trump, also signed off on the false June 29 FISA warrant against Page.

The FISA court order also noted that it is a federal crime for any federal official to “intentionally…disclose[] or use[] information obtained under color of law by electronic surveillance, knowing or having any reason to know that the information was obtained through electronic surveillance not authorized” by law. The following sentence of Boasberg’s ruling is redacted, raising questions about whether the government used any information obtained pursuant to the now-invalid Page surveillance warrants in other cases.

The final warrant against Page overlapped with former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The final three-month authorization to spy on Page was signed nearly six weeks after Mueller was appointed, meaning that Mueller may have had real-time access to and utilized nearly five months worth of surveillance of Page during the course of Mueller’s investigation. If his office used any of the information in subsequent cases, the declaration that the final two spy warrants against Page were invalid could potentially nullify previous or future convictions sought by Mueller’s office.

Surveillance under FISA is not limited to the individual targeted, as the government also surveils individuals with whom the target communicates, and individuals with whom those individuals communicate. That process is called the “two-hop” rule and allows the government to spy on and collect information and communications from individuals who are two degrees separated from the actual surveillance target. Therefore, even if Page never personally spoke to Trump on the phone, the government could still eavesdrop on Trump’s conversations if Page spoke to someone who had spoken to or electronically communicated with the president. It is not known whether the government used the two-hop process on Page to sweep up information from former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, or even the president himself.

In his January 7 order, Boasberg directed DOJ to retain and sequester all information and evidence relevant to both the Carter Page applications, the inspector general investigation of FISA abuse, and any additional DOJ investigations related to or spawned by the inspector general’s report. Boasberg told DOJ to provide all of the required information to the FISA court no later than January 28.

Rosenstein Authorized Release of Strzok-Page Texts

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Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein acknowledged in a court filing Friday that he authorized the release of text messages between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page to media outlets.

Image result for strzok text messages source

Rosenstein said in a declaration filed in response to a lawsuit Strzok has pending against the Justice Department and FBI that he authorized releasing the text messages to media outlets Dec. 12, 2017, the eve of his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.

“The disclosure obviously would adversely affect public confidence in the FBI, but providing the most egregious messages in one package would avoid the additional harm of prolonged selective disclosures and minimize the appearance of the Department concealing information that was embarrassing to the FBI,” said Rosenstein, who left the Justice Department in May 2019.

Strzok, the former deputy chief of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, sued the Justice Department and FBI on Aug. 6, 2019, for unlawful termination, infringement of due process, and violations of the Privacy Act. He said he consulted with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Affairs, which determined that there was no legal basis preventing the release of the messages, and the authorized the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs to provide 375 messages to a group of media outlets.

Rosenstein asserted that Strzok and Page’s privacy interests were not violated by releasing the messages because they “were sent on government phones with the knowledge that they were subject to review by FBI” and because they “were so inappropriate and intertwined with their FBI work that they raised concerns about political bias influencing official duties.”

*** Image result for strzok text messages source

The Justice Department argued that Rosenstein did his due diligence by having his aides consult with the DOJ’s top privacy official Peter Winn on the release of the text messages, and cannot be held responsible for violating the Privacy Act because there was no willful intent.

“Even if [the] Plaintiff could show that the disclosure was somehow inconsistent with the Privacy Act — the Department did not intentionally or willfully violate the statute,” the court filings read. Strzok and Page, who were both members of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation team, were caught exchanging messages that were disparaging of President Trump and highly partisan in nature throughout 2016.

Page, who eventually resigned from the Bureau, sued the DOJ last month over the release of the text messages, claiming it violated the Federal Privacy Act. She said she has suffered numerous damages including therapy costs and “permanent loss of earning capacity due to reputational damage.”

Image result for strzok text messages

Strzok also sued the DOJ last month, claiming his First Amendment Rights had been violated. He is seeking reinstatement on the basis that his firing was unconstitutional. Rosenstein’s declaration was part of the government’s defense in Strzok’s lawsuit.

Rosenstein resigned from his post with the DOJ in April and is now with a corporate law firm in Washington, D.C.

Iran Refuses to Release Black Box of Downed Ukraine Plane

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(Reuters) – Ukraine will press Iran to hand over the black boxes from the crash of a Ukrainian passenger plane at a meeting with a visiting Iranian delegation on Monday, Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko told reporters.

Ukraine would convey the message to visiting Minister of Roads and Urban Development Mohammad Eslami, that returning the black boxes would show that Iran wanted an unbiased investigation of the crash, Prystaiko said.

“His main task is to apologize and acknowledge what happened. We hope that we can go a little further than just political discussions and discuss practical problems. Among them in particular is the return of the black boxes,” Prystaiko said.

Iran has appeared to reverse course after its earlier decision to send abroad the black box flight recorders from the Ukrainian jetliner shot down earlier this month, saying Tehran would first review the audiotapes.

Hassan Rezaeifar, who is leading the investigation into the tragedy, was cited by the state-run IRNA news agency on Sunday as saying: “The flight recorders from the Ukrainian Boeing are in Iranian hands and we have no plans to send them out.”

“We are trying to read the black boxes here in Iran. Otherwise, our options are Ukraine and France, but no decision has been taken so far to send them to another country,” he added.

A day earlier, another Iranian news agency, semi-official Tasnim, cited Rezaeifar as saying that it was not possible to interpret the recordings in Iran, and that the black boxes would be sent to Kyiv, where French, American and Canadian experts would help analyze them.

Image result for ukraine plane  source

***Gotta wonder if the Iranians protesting against the regime know this.

A slew of influential Iranian artists, television personalities and sports stars have publicly broken with Tehran after the government denied for days that it shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane this month.

“Apologies for lying to you for 13 years,” Gelareh Jabbari, a host on the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting TV network, wrote last Monday in an Instagram post. The post has since been deleted, but it was seen by

“It was very hard for me to believe our people have been killed, forgive me for believing this late,” Jabbari, the anchor of the lifestyle show “Good Morning Iran,” added in an apparent reference to the 82 Iranians who were among the 176 passengers and crew members killed.

Iran initially denied that a missile had struck the plane on Jan. 8 shortly after it took off from Tehran, the capital, only to reverse course and admit that it had shot the plane down by mistake.

Many students and middle-class Iranians took to the streets in protest. In Tehran, some students refused to trample on paintings of U.S. and Israeli flags in an apparent rejection of the government’s attempts to deflect blame.

Those in more influential positions used their sway to send a message.

The government’s handling of the incident has served only to “confirm an existing sense of moral bankruptcy that the Islamic Republic is accused of,” said Afshin Shahi, an associate professor of Middle East politics at Bradford University in England.

“The Islamic Republic is facing the worst legitimacy crisis in its 40-year history, and the pressures are mounting from every angle,” he said, adding that state repression, censorship and the country’s economic woes in the last three years had created a profound sense of disillusionment. “The gap between the state and society has widened to an extreme extent.”

In a sign of how seriously Iranian authorities are taking the backlash, the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, delivered a sermon at last week’s Friday prayers praising recent strikes on Iraqi bases hosting U.S. forces.

The Not so Pure Comey Being Investigated AGAIN

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Voters would all be rich if we had a dollar for every leak, lie and scandal coming out of Washington DC.

So, Comey is back in the news…he did a no no.

Department of Justice prosecutors are reportedly investigating the possibility that former FBI director James Comey leaked a classified Russian intelligence document to the media during the Hillary Clinton email investigation, according to a Thursday report from the New York Times.

Per the Times, the investigation is centered around two 2017 articles from the Times and the Washington Post describing the Russian document, which played a key role in Comey’s unilateral decision to announce the FBI would not pursue charges against Clinton for using a private email server to conduct official business during her time as secretary of state.

The document, which was shared with the U.S. by Dutch intelligence, includes an analysis of an email exchange between Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D., Fla.), who was then chairing the Democratic National Committee, and Leonard Bernardo, an official with the Soros-backed non-profit Open Society Foundations. Wasserman-Schultz assures Bernardo in the email that then-attorney general Loretta Lynch will make sure Clinton wasn’t charged in the email probe.

Comey has long taken criticism for his handling of the Clinton investigation from Republicans and President Trump, who suggested in December that Comey could get jail time.
***
Well now, the plot thickens with new names in the equation.
We cannot forget this little item either.Former FBI Director James Comey violated official policy in the way he handled his memos describing his exchanges with President Trump, an investigation concluded — but Comey won’t be charged.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz conducted the investigation into Comey’s actions and then referred his results to prosecutors.

“After reviewing the matter, the DOJ declined prosecution.”

Investigators concluded that Comey broke several rules.

One involved the former director’s decision to arrange for a friend to disclose the contents of a memo to a New York Times reporter. Another involved Comey’s decision to keep memos at home and discuss them with his lawyers but not reveal to the FBI their contents or what he was doing.

***

In part from RedState: Now this new investigation involves leaks relating to two articles including one in the Washington Post and another in the NY Times (now we see why the spinning) about a Russian intelligence document, which the Times says was highly classified.

Now this part is fascinating:

The document played a key role in Mr. Comey’s decision to sideline the Justice Department and announce in July 2016 that the F.B.I. would not recommend that Hillary Clinton face charges in her use of a private email server to conduct government business while secretary of state.

Wait, what? What would a Russian intelligence document have to do with Comey stepping in and taking the power away from the DOJ, which he could not properly do anyway? At the time, Comey implied in his reasoning that there was classified information with regard to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

The document is mentioned in a book published last fall, “Deep State: Trump, the F.B.I., and the Rule of Law” by James B. Stewart, a Times reporter.

Here’s the money paragraph, hidden down in the story.

The latest investigation involves material that Dutch intelligence operatives siphoned off Russian computers and provided to the United States government. The information included a Russian analysis of what appeared to be an email exchange during the 2016 presidential campaign between Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida who was also the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee at the time, and Leonard Benardo, an official with the Open Society Foundations, a democracy-promoting organization whose founder, George Soros, has long been a target of the far right.

In the email, Ms. Wasserman Schultz suggested that then-Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch would make sure that Mrs. Clinton would not be prosecuted in the email case. Both Ms. Wasserman Schultz and Mr. Benardo have denied being in contact, suggesting the document was meant to be Russian disinformation.

That document was one of the key factors that drove Mr. Comey to hold a news conference in July 2016 announcing that investigators would recommend no charges against Mrs. Clinton. Typically, senior Justice Department officials would decide how to proceed in such a high-profile case, but Mr. Comey was concerned that if Ms. Lynch played a central role in deciding whether to charge Mrs. Clinton, Russia could leak the email.

Whoa, so strip everything away and what the document says is that Debbie Wasserman Schultz was guaranteeing that Lynch would get Hillary Clinton off.

So where is the investigation of this?

The Times does the best it can, suggesting it’s disinformation. They literally accuse Trump of trying to pressure the DOJ to investigate his enemies despite no such thing ever occurring.

But American officials at the time did not believe that Ms. Lynch would hinder the Clinton email investigation, and neither Ms. Wasserman Schultz nor Mr. Benardo had any inside information about it. Still, if the Russians had released the information after the inquiry was closed, it could have tainted the outcome, hurt public confidence in the Justice Department and sowed discord.

Prosecutors are also looking at whether Mr. Richman might have played a role in providing the information to reporters about the Russia document and how it figured into Mr. Comey’s rationale about the news conference, according to the people familiar with the investigation. Mr. Comey hired Mr. Richman at one point to consult for the F.B.I. about encryption and other complex legal issues, and investigators have expressed interest in how he operated.

Mr. Richman was quoted in the April 2017 article in The Times that revealed the document’s existence. A month later, The Post named Ms. Wasserman Schultz and Mr. Benardo as subjects of the document in a detailed article. A lawyer for Mr. Richman declined to comment.

This is going to be interesting to see it when the information ultimately comes out without the New York Times spin on it. But this is pretty huge.