550

As noted in previous chapters there’s some reason for concern that the IG investigation on Emailgate has been compromised politically by Trump loyalists. From where? Well from the DOJ but on the other hand from within the FBI itself-as we’ve seen it wasn’t called Trumpland in 2016 for nothing.

The IG report was supposed to investigate the irregularities of the Emailgate investigation. It did call out Comey’s mishandling-both true and highly ironic as that was the legal neologism he pronounced against Clinton in the presser-that he was insubordinate and driven moral vanity. But it had nothing to say about a chief reason so many were calling for an investigation-the belief that there was widespread leaking from rogue anti Clinton pro Trump FBI agents in the last few months of the election.

To be sure, the word is that the part of the IG report dealing with the leaks from the rogue agents is still in transit-it will be coming out though I’ve not heard of when. In Comey’s June 5, 2017 testimony-in the aftermath of being fired by Trump-he revealed that there is an investigation into the leaks. Yet we’ve still heard no word on it yet-is the investigation still ongoing? So while the June, 2018 report had nothing about the leaks it had plenty about the texts of Peter Strozk and Lisa Page-and this is after the earlier report about McCabe in March of this year. Why these are higher priorities than the leaks of the rogue agents is anyone’s guess. Perhaps the rogue agents themselves are delaying this report.

UPDATE: As of today-February, 20-we still have yet to hear a word about the IG’s followup report on the rogue agents. Meanwhile, in McCabe’s book that came out yesterday, it’s clear that the decision to fire him came after he backed up Comey’s version of events around his firing when McCabe testified before Congress in late 2017. Then almost immediately after the GOP Congress started inveighing against him and Trump taunted him on Twitter as ‘racing against the clock’ over the next three months to get his pension.

In any case whatever is in the leak report, if it doesn’t discuss Trump Pundit, it won’t be worth that much. The pro Trump fake news site True Pundit appears to have a pipeline into: rogue FBI agents who hate Clinton. Remember when Giuliani declared there’s a revolution at the FBI? 

“So did the rank-and-file FBI agents in the New York field office of the FBI have a motive to use Giuliani’s friends as an intermediary to illegally feed confidential information to the Trump campaign? Absolutely, says Giuliani. Asked on November 4, on Fox & Friends, about whether he had heard about the “reopening” of the Clinton investigation prior to James Comey announcing it publicly, Giuliani replied, “Did I hear about it? You’re darn right I heard about it. And I can’t even repeat the language that I heard from the former FBI agents.” And Giuliani has had much more to say on this point since then, conceding to having inside information about the “tremendous anger within the FBI about…Comey’s conclusion [to not recommend criminal charges against Clinton in July] and…the way they [the FBI rank-and-file] believed they were being obstructed by what they regard as a pretty corrupt Obama Justice Department.”

In this revolution, the fake news Trump website True Pundit seems to have played an outsized role. The website first appeared just about a month before Comey’s-uh very careless-July 5 presser.

But as Abramson notes, Orlando was a turning point.

By this definition TP existed as a place for disgruntled former FBI agents to complain about the agency.

And to fulminate against: Hillary Clinton.

At this point True Pundit was already a walking, talking Hatch violation.

What’s rather amazing is that top brass at the FBI quickly became aware of TP-yes, including Comey himself AND they believed it had sources in the FBI-Andy McCabe believed they had top sources within the FBI.

Indeed, an FOIA request by-who else?-Judicial Watch-who as we saw in the previous chapter on Roger Stone-was the outfit that obtained Huma Abedin’s emails via another FOIA request-later showing up on Weiner’s laptop as if by magic-showed that McCabe considered the sources top rate within the Bureau itself.

By the way-these conversations about True Pundit occur the same week Comey decided to do the letter to ‘reopen or maybe not reopen’ the Emailgate probe.

Abramson-persuasively-surmises that this was the reason for the Comey letter.

Yes, Wikileaks also colluded with TruePundit. Indeed, there were rogue agents literally threatening to leak the information about Weiner’s laptop to Wikileaks if Comey and friends didn’t make a public announcement.

But it makes sense that the rogue FBI agents and Wikileaks were co-conspirators. After all, like Wikileaks-and like Putin himself-the rogue FBI agents were motivated by nothing like they’re motivated by Clinton Derangement Syndrome.

Note the beauty of such Fake News: it appealed to not just the Clinton hating Right but the Clinton hating Left who wrongly believed Assange a leftist transparency advocate when in truth he is and has long been a Putin supporting stooge of the Right.

UPDATE: We now know that Corsi in his emails with Roger Stone came up with the idea to claim Clinton was sick or dying-as we see in Chapter A, Corsi had his own leak to the NYPD and NY FBI anti Clinton agents.

Yes that’s a topic we’re going to get into more in a subsequent chapter but basically the rogue agents at the FBI who ‘found’ the emails on Weiner’s laptops-more like working with Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi and friends they planted them on his laptop-basically didn’t look at them till the last week of October so as to pigeonhole Comey into the letter-much like Comey himself had pigeonholed Loretta Lynch into letting him do the Comey Presser.

After the Comey letter TP was happy to claim full credit:

But it’s important to also understand that this is not just history-True Pundit continues to engage in pro Trump fake news by rogue FBI agents to this say. With the ‘victory’ of Trump-it’s in quotes as it was rigged-as they along with Wikileaks and Russia rigged it-TP in a sense got a promotion.

UPDATE: The anti  Clinton pro Trump rogue agents that the IG promised to but failed to deliver a report on are still at it today. 

There’s your Deep State and it’s pro Trump and GOP and the beat goes on same as it always was.

Again this is a 111 year old institution that has never had a Democratic FBI Director in this long history.

End of UPDATE

That’s right they were demanding that Comey be fired.

This year we’ve finally learned the identity of Thomas Paine at True Pundit.

Would you believe his name is Michael Moore-no not that Micheal Moore?

“Former journalist exposed as man behind misinformation site True Pundit.”

“Michael D. Moore once was an award-winning business reporter. Now he writes fake news about the FBI and Hillary Clinton all day.”

“Michael D. Moore, 51, used to work as a reporter for the New Jersey newspaper The Record, where he won a Loeb Award for business journalism in 1996, Buzzfeed News reports. He left the paper to start an investigations service in the late ’90s. Today, he runs a site that specializes in wildly fake stories about Hillary Clinton, the FBI and alleged “deep state” conspiracies that are heavily amplified by other fake news sites and pro-Trump celebrities on Twitter.”

“Moore publishes and tweets under the pseudonym Thomas Paine. That persona claims to be a former journalist who has a vast network of anonymous sources inside the FBI and CIA, who supposedly feed him the details in his psuedo-bombshell stories. They have included: Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page told Congress that Chinese hackers accessed Hillary Clinton’s email server; Clinton wanted to murder Julian Assange by drone when she secretary of state; the FBI was covering up the fact that the Las Vegas shooter didn’t act alone; and the NYPD was threatening to leak information about Clinton’s criminality if James Comey didn’t indict her before the election. The latter story was retweeted by former national security adviser Mike Flynn and Donald Trump Jr.”

Here is Moore soon after his identity become known.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeVd9nQqX5c

As you can see he’s as obsessed with the Clintons as ever. Supposedly they alone get away with everything though the election was stolen from her thanks to the work of Paine and his rogue agents, Wikileaks, the Russians, et. al.

He seems not to notice that Trump is the one who hasn’t been punished for anything-not sexual assault, not tax evasion, not emoluments, not all his massive business corruption and criminality, not even for colluding with the Russian government. at least not yet-still has an entire party behind him and defends his right to commit any crime-no doubt Lindsay Graham would defend him if he killed someone out on 5th Ave and Rudy Giuliani says that even if he assassinated Comey he still couldn’t be charged. Rudy is willing to say he could be impeached but not a day in prison.

UPDATE: Finally post Ukraine if you’re listening there may be some accountability. To be sure his party is with him lockstep and his own attorney recently argued with a straight face in a federal court Trump can shoot someone on 5th avenue and get away with it.

Meanwhile the GOP House strategy seems to be whining the President is not being treated fairly and that this is all about overturning an election. 

Not for nothing but that election wasn’t legitimate in the first place so how can it be ‘overturned?’ In the second place impeachment is not ‘overturning an election’ otherwise why would the Framers give Congress this power? Impeachment isn’t an unlawful coup-quite the opposite it’s a solemn power enshrined in the Constitution.

But the idea that the Democrats must scrupulously uphold Trump’s ‘due process’ and treat him fairly is itself risible. Again this is someone who’s attorneys argue in federal court that he literally can shoot someone and get away with it-is that fair enough for Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan? Rudy Giuliani argued in 2 zero 18 that Trump could assassinate Comey and not be charged. At the time Rudy grandly allowed that Congress could impeach him-though that’s probably not his view today now that Congress has in fact opened an impeachment investigation.

Meanwhile if not for the Office Trump gained through illegitimate and nefarious means-another lie the MSM allows Trump and the GOP co-conspirators to repeat again and again is that Mueller proved there was no collusion-actually the MR is full of collusion-he’d be in the prison cell next to Michael Cohen.

Mueller bent over backwards to be fair to Trump-not only did he fail to require Trump to sit for an interview-compare this with all the GOP howls over the fact Clinton brought her lawyer to her interview-he didn’t make his namesake son sit for an interview either and declined to indict him under the totally novel concept that ignorance is an excuse. Recently we realized that Mueller was even fairer to the fake  ‘President’ than we realized-neither Don Jr or Don McGahn were required to testify before the Grand Jury.

Indeed, with all the MSM snark about the Mueller Report not moving the public-the question has been asked why Pelosi coming out for impeachment has moved the needle in a way the MR didn’t I think part of it is that Mueller really pulled his punches both in his indictment and declination decisions but never gave the public any idea of what he was doing during the 21 months of his investigation.

All you had was the coordinated lies and misinformation from Trump and the GOP co-conspirators about witch hunt and a Deep State coup with no response from Team Mueller-the one time Mueller’s SC chose to respond it was to knock down a bad story for Trump from Buzzfeed.

Indeed, before the fact  you had all the institutionalist types who had dismissed an impeachment inquiry as a partisan exercise as opposed to the SC investigation held as above the fray. But that’s just it-Mueller was too above the fray. At least with the Democratic Congress you have a public face of the investigations that can counteract the lies of Trump and the GOP co-conspirators-lies that are becoming more and more despicable-they’ve now woven the whistleblower into some intricate tapestry with the fake Deep State conspiracy-again as we saw above the real Deep State conspiracy-as opposed to the fake one-is the rogue FBI agents continuing to work in the service of Trump over at True Pundit and elsewhere.

But regarding Mueller it seems you can’t get a happy medium. When a Democrat is investigated you get cowboys like Ken Starr and Comey-constantly leaking damaging info and holding court-remember Ken Starr’s long chats with journalists at the end of his driveway?

When the subject is a Republican suddenly you get a teetotaler who eschews all attention.

End of UPDATE

Ok, in conclusion on this part of the planning for the great coincidences with the Comey letter, I will note that there is some question if Michael E. Moore really has the FBI sources he says he does. 

“The question of who’s behind True Pundit has itself become the source of wild theories. Viral #resistance tweeter Seth Abramson dedicated an 84-tweet thread to True Pundit and Paine. Abramson argued that True Pundit was being fed information by “a cadre of pro-Trump FBI agents and intel officers — some active, some retired — [who] conspired to swing the election to Trump.” (Another Twitter user investigated the account and concluded it’s a fake persona concocted by the Trump campaign’s social media team.)

“More credibly, Zachary Elwood, an author of poker books who also investigates social media accounts, published a detailed investigation of True Pundit at whoistruepundit.com that revealed a litany of details about Paine’s identity.”

So right away we see that the writer, Craig Silverman, is skeptical that Michael Moore really has the FBI sources he claims to have.

“Could Paine really be perhaps the best-sourced reporter in America when it comes to big cases being investigated by the FBI, NYPD, and other agencies? Is he someone federal agents would leak incredibly sensitive information to, at the risk of being fired and/or prosecuted? Or is he using his pseudonym to conceal relevant details about his background that further undermine his many dubious claims?”

It’s clear that despite the risks of being fired and/or prosecuted federal agents leak incredibly sensitive information all the time for any host of reasons. It’s widely understood that the rabidly anti Clinton pro Trump agents in the NY FBI office and NYPD were leaking to someone. Our question is whether they would leak to TP. If you’re a rogue FBI agent who hated Clinton would you leak to Breitbart? Breitbart itself ran with the stories from TP in October, 2016.

Back to Silverman:

“To get answers, BuzzFeed News investigated Paine’s and True Pundit’s social media accounts, business and court records, and other publicly available information. They reveal that Thomas Paine is, in fact, Michael D. Moore, 51, a Pennsylvania man with a background in journalism, a criminal record as a result of an FBI investigation, and a long history of shady and illegal business practices.”

“Given that he was busy selling Irish peat logs and pirated hockey content, it’s difficult to know how much, if any, investigative work Moore did in the decade or more before launching True Pundit. And when the site launched he had been out of journalism for roughly 20 years.”

“Did Moore maintain whatever contacts he might have had in the heyday of Dig Dirt and his newspaper career? Would these contacts have reengaged with a convicted criminal fresh off probation and now writing under a pseudonym? And what useful current information could longtime former agents have about current investigations and cases?”

Well that depends: former agents are often in the loop with current agents, they have friends still at the agency, etc. If you appreciate Giuliani’s claim that ‘there’s a revolution going on within the FBI’ who felt that the truth about Clinton was being covered up what do you think they might do to get the ‘truth’ out there? You think the one thing they would not do is tell former agents with access to media about it?

Even if initially Moore totally inflated his contacts by October, 2016 his site was getting huge traffic as Silverman documents. His claims about inside info from anti Clinton FBI agents was RTed by Michael Flynn and Donald Jr. So if you’re a rogue agent that is determined to take Clinton down, why wouldn’t you give it to TP regardless of what Moore’s true rolodex was? What he demonstrably was able to deliver was eyeballs and clicks. What matters to you as a rogue anti Clinton agent is that TrumpWorld will get your message loud and clear.

Don’t get me wrong-his site is a fake news site. But fake news sites were a big part of what both the Alt Right and the Russians used to take Clinton down in 2016.

As to the question of what are Moore’s real FBI contacts that’s a good and very interesting question. It’s what a future Dem Congressional Select Committee on Comeygate must investigate so as to answer. Silverman is a skeptic:

“David Gomez is a former FBI national security executive who reviewed several True Pundit stories at the request of BuzzFeed News. He said some displayed a lack of understanding about basic FBI procedures.”

“The key thing that I took away from those stories is that a lot of the quotes and a lot of the factual situations that he relates do not ring true based on my 28 years of experience in the FBI,” Gomez said in an interview.

Ok but you know who else displayed lacking an understanding of basic FBI procedures? James Comey. Speaking of which, Silverman himself documents that-as Abramson also noted-True Pundit attracted the notice of Comey himself.

“One of Paine’s 2016 stories even led to an email exchange between then–FBI director James Comey and his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, about whether True Pundit really had sources inside the FBI. Paine, of course, seized upon that as evidence that he’s as well-sourced as he claims. (He loves to criticize the bureau: The site has used the phrase “Federal Bureau of Incompetence” in the headline of five different stories.)”

But wether he is or isn’t well sourced, he convinced McCabe-the then Deputy FBI Director that he was and even Comey seemed to think he had sources, though not as high level. If he has no sources it’s pretty impressive he was able to convince the both the Director and deputy Director that he did. It says something for his literary style if nothing else.

Congress has also taken True Pundit seriously as a conduit for rogue FBI leakers. In December, 2017 Elijah Cummings and Jerrold Nadler demanded answers regarding True Pundit and any role it had in receiving and disseminating information from the rogue agents.

FN: May God rest Congressman Cummings’ soul. Since the Democrats took over in January, Judiciary has not as far as I know looked into TP or the larger Comeygate scandal-while the Dem House largely dithered the first 7 months prior to Mueller’s testimony-with Richard Neal punting on getting the tax returns-he did claim to be seeking them but was so slow to get into it by July we were hearing we may not see them until after the election-a lot of good they’d do then.

It is true however that since the explosion of the Ukraine if you’re listening scandal they have had their hands pretty busy-which does not mean Americans aren’t still owed the truth on how GOP partisans at the FBI elected Trump.

One gripe I have is the tendency of the MSM-many Dems in the House fail to push back on the narrative-to completely dismiss Mueller and Russiagate in retrospect failing to get that Ukraine if you’re listening is simply the logical sequel to Ukraine if you’re listening; literally the day after Mueller testified Trump was on the phone shaking down the Ukrainian President.

I’ve heard it said that Americans can buy that Ukraine is a problem as it’s prospective regarding 2020. Ok but to just look at this in a vacuum is a pretty cramped not to mention misleading way to look at it-those of us who actually understand Trump did collude with Russia in 2016 don’t find the fact he did it again very surprising. Indeed, the GOP talking point that Democratic calls for impeachment somehow lack credibility because they were calling for it long before Ukraine if you’re listening entirely miss the point. This doesn’t make those like myself who wanted to #ImpeachtheMFer a long time ago-I was already thinking about it the day after Trump’s fake win in 2016-somehow wrong it makes us right. 

The Ukraine scandal proves Trump is exactly who we warned you he was.”

 

Exactly-why should those of us who have been saying this about  Trump for three years have egg on our faces rather than his GOP co-conspirators who will defend anything as either a ‘nothingburger’ or a Deep State Conspiracy-once again ignoring the point made above that the real Deep State conspiracy took down Hillary Clinton and elevated Donald Trump-as well as the both sides do it MSM who has tried to normalize Trump for three years and ignored Russia as long as they could and then took Bill Barr’s fake exoneration and ran with it-even once Barr had been totally discredited the pundits continued to accept his false narrative. Even now the ‘smartset’ continue to make the irksome claim that ‘Americans are tired of Mueller and anything to do with relitigating 2016 which is some real chutzpah as if it’s true that the majority of people believe that Mueller found there was no collusion that’s thanks to the MSM’s accepting Barr’s fake exoneration as the gospel truth.

Just like in the Emailgate fiasco it’s the MSM punditry themselves who have ‘President Trump’ all over their hands.

End FN.

“Amid broader complaints about the Justice Department’s interactions with Congressional Democrats, the letter from Nadler and Cummings specifically focuses on whether articles published last year by the “fringe conspiracy website True Pundit” might suggest anti-Clinton bias at the FBI.”

“The letter suggests that True Pundit — an anonymously written pro-Trump website — received information from FBI agents frustrated with the agency’s handling of the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. They ask Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions whether the information provided to True Pundit may have influenced the FBI’s decision to reopen the Clinton investigation a week before the election.

True Pundit published multiple stories last year claiming that the FBI did not bring charges in the Clinton case because senior officials there supported her campaign. The site claimed to have sources inside the government.

“By fall of 2016, True Pundit had attracted the notice of the FBI’s most senior officials. New emails released by the FBI, in response to a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act request, show that the bureau’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe, forwarded to then-director James Comey an Oct. 26 True Pundit story which insinuated that McCabe’s wife had been paid by Clinton’s political allies to boost a failed 2015 bid for Virginia state senate.”

“FYI. Heavyweight source,” McCabe wrote to Comey. (Comey demurred, saying that the leak appeared to come from “lower-level folks.”)

Interestingly, the House Republicans themselves wrote the DOJ regarding True Pundit. 

When Comey, McCabe, the House Republicans, and the House Democrats all want to know more about who True Pundit was talking to it seems to me this ought to be an avenue of investigation in the future Democratic Select Committee on Comeygate.

 

 

 

 

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