85 True Pundit October 2016: NYPD Chief Threatens to Leak Huma Abedin’s Emails to Wikileaks

UPDATE: This chapter doesn’t need much substantive improvement-possibly smooth out conclusion.

UPDATE 2.0: Or even editing wise

 

The point about Comey’s true state of mind regarding the bogus claim about Huma is important-though not central to the subject of this chapter. However leaving it as a CF to Chapter 23 Years isn’t terrible either

There’s been some debate as to who exactly True Pundit is and who their actual sources are. The website has always claimed to have top sources. Seth Abramson gives a good history for TP which in 2016 emerged as the website for anti Clinton rogue FBI agents everywhere.

FN: Ie the agenda of Barbara Leeden’s manifesto she sent Bannon back in June, 2015

See chapter Leeden Manifesto

End FN

However after the Orlando nightclub shooting in June, 2016 things started to change.

In yet another interesting correlation:

Again how good TP’s sources really are-much less if they actually have FBI on staff-has been a source of debate-as usual there are (Savvy)skeptics. In 2018 Thomas Paine’s real name was revealed to be Michael E. Moore. 

Of course, there were few things during Trump’s illegitimate regime the Savvy pundits took more pleasure than throwing shade at ‘resistance liberals.’ Note that by definition the phrase normalizes Trump-it’s premise is that the Resistance liberals are overdoing it-Trump’s not that bad.

“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.)

“Viral #resistance tweeter Seth Abramson dedicated an 84-tweet thread “the savvy snark just drips. The Savvy had scorn for ‘resistance liberals’ because they exaggerated how bad Trump was, The had further disdain for resistance liberals on Twitter, and the very fact that such liberals would post 84 tweets proved they were declasse as far as the Savvy were concerned. And then Seth Abramson… I’m a big fan of Seth but for the Savvy he’s pretty much the epitome of everything they disdain in ‘resistance liberals.

FN: What’s further notable is that even those the MSM sees as resistance liberals mostly, uh, resist the term resistance liberal. Probably the two writers who most fit the Savvy’s idea of resistance liberals are Seth and Marcy Wheeler but both of them have pretty sharply made the point they don’t consider themselves part of any #resistance.In that I may be unique-almost everyone seems to take the idea they are part of it an insult. I consider it a compliement.

“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.”

Among the many clues: Paine and his lawyer say he is based in the Philadelphia area; he has talked publicly about covering the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 as a newspaper reporter; he used to run a Twitter account called @HockeyIntel before changing his handle to @Thomas1774Paine; and he once tweeted a photo of what he said is his Gerald Loeb Award, a prestigious business journalism prize.”

“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?”

“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.”

“After being contacted for comment, Moore did not respond and instead published a story on his website confirming BuzzFeed News’ reporting.”

“Just as Paine has publicly stated, Moore won a Loeb Award in 1996 while working for the Record, a New Jersey newspaper. He also authored at least some coverage of TWA Flight 800: A copy of the front page of a New Jersey newspaper from Sept. 12, 1996, features a story with his byline that examined airport security in light of the crash. (To read how BuzzFeed News found Moore, see the section “Connecting Michael D. Moore to True Pundit and Thomas Paine” at the bottom of this story.)”

“Paine has also talked publicly about leaving journalism in the late ’90s to work in “intelligence.” During that same time period, Moore created a company called Dig Dirt that he described as an investigations service. He left his newspaper job to work on it full time. The company’s site is now offline, but as recently as the fall of 2016 it contained language that directly echoes the messaging of True Pundit.”

Wild theories… More credibly… With such savvy phrases, Buzzfeed author, Craig Silverman reveals himself the kind of guy considers anyone who doesn’t believe the Warren Report is a ‘conspiracy nut.’

FN: Even though the official position of the government is that the Lone Nut Theory is wrong.

End FN

The savvy Bible sayeth that the correct explanation is always the most boring and prosaic one-unless the subject is Hillary Clinton.

As for Silverman’s savvy question: “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?”

If Silverman’s savvy premise is right then you would likely expect a world in which there are very few leaks from the FBI and NYPD-as the risk is too great that you will be Andy McCabed. This premise, however, in fact tells us a lot more about Silverman’s cramped understanding and imagination of the world than anything else.

UPDATE: What stands out about Moore is that he’d make a classic, practically perfect cutout a la Rob Goldman. But this point is lost on the Savvy

Indeed as we see in Chapter A, Michael Horowitz has decided to table his investigation into leaks from rogue anti Clinton agents late in the 2016 election under the-rather surreal-premise that because there were so many leaks they were commonplace and so-for some bizarre-reason, this means-in a way sensible only to Horowitz-none of these leaks should be documented. This upside down logic somehow didn’t save Andy McCabe but he was on the wrong side of Trump so…

So McCabe went on to see his career destroyed but the other 100 leaking agents get away scotfree thereby disproving Silverman’s savvy premise-if you’re a senior FBI person, your chance of paying the price for leaking is very small so long as you leak-like most of the FBI leakers-to the greater good of the Republican party.

So there’s no question that the rogue FBI agents were leaking the only quibble is wether TruePundit was one of the top conduits- as was, say, Devlin Barrett.

“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 “truth” out there? You think the one thing they would not do is tell former agents with access to media about it?

FN: As we see in chapter Why the Comey Letter? Comey would reveal in a conversation with Loretta Lynch that many former FBI senior staff continued to come to work-no doubt largely motivated by the desire to take down THAT WOMAN. This further underscores the point that drawing a line between current and former FBI agents during this time misses the point as many “former” people stayed on to continue the anti Clinton crusade.

End FN

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 work history was? What he demonstrably was able to deliver were eyeballs and clicks. What matters to you as a rogue anti Clinton agent is that TrumpWorld will get your message loud and clear not proofreading Moore’s resume.

As for his scoffing at Moore’s time ‘selling Irish peat logs and  pirated hockey content’ etc-as we saw in the case of Papadopoulos or Rob Goldstone-that’s often how these kinds of shady operations work-you want a cutout-someone who can plausibly be dismissed as a marginal figure if the you know what hits the fan-so that is far less dispositive than Silverman imagines. Many intel operations require deep cover, etc-so that if they are found savvy ‘skeptics’ like a Silverman who ‘don’t believe in conspiracy theories’-at least not ones that don’t involve Hillary Clinton can dismiss the whole thing as ‘a conspiracy theory.’

FN: These folks should watch How to Get Away With Murder some time-as this is how Annalise gets away with everything; because to catch her you’d need to believe in conspiracy theories as she never does her own dirty work. What these savvy pundits never get is that a large percent of crimes are conspiracies-any time you have more than one criminal actor it’s a ‘conspiracy.’ In Emailgate cum Comeygate, Horowtiz’s report that he won’t show us demonstrate there were at least 100 GOP co-conspirators just at the FBI.

And indeed, Silverman does acknowledge that both Comey and McCabe believed TP did have sources inside the FBI.

“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.)

Yet Silverman seems not to appreciate how problematic this admission of his is-even if he and his buddy Zachary Elwood who writes books about poker finds the idea that the leaking rogue anti Clinton agent leaked to Moore’s site pretty ‘implausible’, both the then FBI Director and the FBI Deputy Director believed TruePundit did have FBI sources-yet Silverman seems not to get that this is highly dispositive of his and Elwood’s skepticism.

FN: As these two top FBI bosses didn’t find it so implausible.

But if Silverman comes from an assumption that most FBI agents wouldn’t leak because the risks are too high yet Horowitz reveals that the leaks against Clinton were commonplace in the late stages of the 2016 election. The agents were leaking at best you can quibble if they would use TP. At first glance if you go only by his public resume-as savvy pundits do-the savvy only believe what they read in the NY Times this might seem unlikely.

But if you’re a rogue anti Clinton agent in October 2016 you’re probably happy to leak anywhere with a wide readership as TP did whatever Moore’s personal work history really is. That he himself can be publicly dismissed as a marginal figure is a feature not a bug.

Again, while Silverman feels pretty certain there were few if any FBI sources-Comey and McCabe believed otherwise and Horowitz confirmed in his IG investigation there was widespread anti Clinton leaking at the agency.

McCabe in particular believed there were heavyweight sources. Comey believed there were sources but perhaps a little ‘less heavyweight.’ So whom to believe? Without further investigation-much of it perhaps covered in the IG report or to be built on it-we can’t know for sure though if I had to bet my money would be on McCabe. It’s just that Comey is such an unreliable narrator on all things Emailgate. So I could certainly imagine him minimizing.

FN: He did later testify that was concerned about leaks-though in the IG report he tried to have it both ways in admitting there was a danger of leaks while insisting this danger wasn’t an important factor in his Comey Letter.

See Mensch Chapter B.

End FN

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.

“The facts point to a coordinated effort by some in the FBI to change the course of the Clinton investigation by leaking sensitive information to the public,” write Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the senior Democrats on the House’s judiciary and oversight committees.”

 

“Days before Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is set to testify before the House judiciary committee, the two lawmakers are calling on Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to turn over any material showing FBI agents or officials revealing “animus” toward Clinton.”

FN: Of course Rosenstein and Sessions-and later Christopher Wray simply ignored such document requests from the Democrats who have in fact proven to be pretty good at taking no for an answer.

“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.

So Comey, McCabe, Congressmen Cummings and Nadler take it seriously but Silverman and Zachary Elwood who writes about poker dismiss it as a conspiracy theory.

 

“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.”

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.”

To be sure since Horowitz is hiding his report and the Democrats-who ARE interested in investigating Trump’s conspiracy theory about Covid being hatched in a Chinese lab-seem content to allow Horowitz to go on hiding it-we know no more about the answer to these crucial and vitally important questions now than we did four years ago.

Regarding heavyweight sources TruePundit quoted a NYPD chief-the officer directly beneath the NYPD Commissioner threatening to leak Huma’s emails to Julian Assange  before Comey released the letter.

Silverman also finds this hard to believe once again showing his lack of either imagination or understanding of the fact that conspiracies do happen much less how they work.

“BREAKING BOMBSHELL: NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes with Children, Child Exploitation, Pay to Play, Perjury,” read the headline.

The story was built on the recent news that the FBI had reopened an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails after discovering messages on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, the husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin.”

But here he shows that he doesn’t understand how these sorts of schemes work.

In the end, the FBI found that the emails in question were largely duplicates, and it soon closed the investigation. But before that happened, True Pundit quoted “NYPD sources” to claim that there was enough information on the laptop “to put Hillary (Clinton) and her crew away for life.”

It quoted one “NYPD Chief” saying, “What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach.”

The story also claimed that this senior NYPD officer was ready to go public with the contents of the laptop if they were not released by the FBI. But in reality, no incriminating information was found on the laptop about perjury, money laundering, or child exploitation related to Clinton or any of her advisers. And in spite of the anonymous “NYPD Chief” declaring the emails had “turned [his] stomach,” no such emails ever surfaced. (Weiner pleaded guilty to federal obscenity charges related to text messages and Skype chats with a minor.)”

What does Silverman imagine the fact that there was nothing actually incriminating on the email dispositive of exactly? That therefore there were no high ranking leakers from the NYPD and NY FBI? He imagines such folks are above lying? Yes Hillary had done nothing wrong and there was nothing in the emails as Comey himself announced in his November 6 memo. But by then it didn’t matter. The lies and rumors had served their purpose.

FN: Of course it was always obvious that they were likely to find little more than duplicates which is just one more reason for skepticism of the excuses and rationalizations of Comey and Friends.

End FN

Would an NYPD chief really speak to TP? It seems unbelievable to Silverman because of the credentialized understanding of the world of MSM journalists who can’t imagine that in the real world actual things don’t always proceed according to the seating chart. Or that absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence-which is why simply relying on public information isn’t enough. Whatever the truth about Michael E. Moore he fits the profile of many intel assets over the years.

A resume selling pirated hockey equipment and Irish peats is the kind of deep cover intel looks for in a sensitive operation. I’m not saying definitively Moore is an intel asset just that an apparently spotty public record is not dispositive as if you’re doing a sensitive operation that’s what you would look for. Someone who’s easy to dismiss.  I mean how does Silverman imagine such operations would be done-by using people who’s Linkein profile makes them instantly recognizable to most of the country?

FN: If his skepticism is based largely on the premise that high ranking officials don’t leak he should consider what Comey told Loretta Lynch after his Comey Letter-this book covers this in Chapter A. He stated that many of the leakers couldn’t be touched because they were ‘very senior people’ some staying over after retirement.

To be clear I don’t know that the NYPD chief in late 2016 spoke to TP. He could have or maybe it was someone on his staff or maybe it a lower ranked person who based this characterization on hearsay. But logically we know how much anti Clinton sentiment there was at the NYPD how hard they worked to give Weiner’s laptop to the NY FBI-Chapter A.

 

As we will see in a later chapter there’s also Corsi’s own confession of his, Stone’s, and especially Peter Smith’s role in getting the emails on the laptop. Corsi asserts that it only happened thanks to Smith’s intel connections at NYPD. So the NYPD chief threatening to leak the emails to Wikileaks if Comey doesn’t make them public doesn’t seem crazy based on the understanding of Emailgate laid out in this book.

So if the notion that the NYPD chief leaked information to TP isn’t absurd on its face then the logical next step would be to figure out who this was in 2016-he’s the highest ranking officer at the NYPD after the Commissioner and ask him. Then based on what he says follow up with staff and others who were in contact with him at that time.

 

Back to the Savvy Silverman:

“Clinton is a frequent target of the site. True Pundit was the source of the made-up claim that Clinton once asked “Can’t we just drone this guy?” about Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Paine’s report cited “State Department sources” and relied on a total misrepresentation of standard State Department language. The story was soon amplified by WikiLeaks itself, as well as by Infowars, Russia Today, and others. It generated more than 83,000 engagements on Facebook and was shared on Twitter more than 80,000 times. (It’s also the story True Pundit submitted for a Polk Award.)

“The false claim that Hillary Clinton used a tiny earpiece during one of the presidential debates also originated with True Pundit. It cited “NYPD sources involved with the NBC forum’s security detail.” Fox News, Infowars, and others picked it up. (Donald Trump Jr. also tweeted the resulting Infowars story.)”

The site has also falsely claimed that Clinton used hand signals with one of the debate moderators during a 2016 presidential debate, and that she was drunk one morning before a campaign rally.

FN: There was also the TP fake news story that HRC was drunk based on what was claimed to be Secret Service sources. 

As we see in Chapter C we look at the fact that like the FBI the Secret Service is also a very Republican place.

End FN

The FBI is another favorite target. The site published a series of conspiracy-laden stories alleging that the bureau’s leadership covered up evidence suggesting that Las Vegas mass shooter Stephen Paddock was not alone. One story also falsely claimed Paddock was a member of the self-described “antifa” and that “FBI & Vegas police worked hard to conceal Paddock’s politics.”

The site also speculated that Orlando Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen was an FBI informant and that the agency was trying to cover that up. Moore later updated his theory to say “definitively” that Mateen was either an FBI informant or he was somehow radicalized by FBI informants during a botched operation. (Neither are true, though Mateen’s father was an informant.)

More recently, True Pundit has been focused on stories that paint the picture of a broad conspiracy involving every US intelligence agency, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, former attorney general Loretta Lynch, British intelligence, Sen. John McCain, former US attorney Preet Bharara, former deputy attorney general Sally Yates, and others in an illegal plot to prevent Trump from winning the election.

The site has also claimed that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Michael Flynn were all wiretapped as part of this plot as early as 2015. (It’s no surprise, then, that in one of his YouTube appearances as Paine, Moore voiced praise for Infowars conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, a major proponent of the QAnon conspiracy theory.)

Obviously I agree that these are all lies what I don’t agree with is Silverman’s hasty assumption that TP doesn’t have any sources at NYPD and NYFBI.

The fact that Moore praised Corsi suggests-as one would presume-that he too is part of the Stone-Corsi-Peter Smith Nexus and had a crucial role in getting the emails on the laptop-starting with all the lies printed his website that put more pressure on Comey and Friends.

UPDATE: This conjecture perhaps belongs at the bottom to finish chapter.

I mean at a minimum he must have also had early knowledge of what would become the Comey Letter. As we saw in Chapter Devin Nunes, the then GOP Chairman of HSPCI knew about Huma’s emails magically showing up on her husband’s laptop within a day or two of John Robertson’s allegedly coming across them quite by accident on September 27, 2016.

With this fact pattern in mind it’s clear that Moore must have heard about the emails no later than Nunes-indeed, quite possibly earlier in light of his relationship to Corsi and his rogue NYFBI sources-again Silverman thinks they don’t exist, but Comey, McCabe, Nadler,, and Eliza Cummings all believed they do so I know who I find more credible.

In reality Moore virtually certainly knew about the emails long before Robertson allegedly found them on September 27. Again as we document in Chapter Unreported Background, the eytmology of the Comey Letter begun with the successful FOIA request of Judicial Watch into Huma’s emails that they obtained in August of 2016. But the Nexus-Stone-Corsi-Peter Smith and many others-Leeden, Joseph Schmitz, Erik Prince-Steve Bannon-etc-needed a way to weaponize them. Smith finally saved the day with his intelligence contacts at NYPD and NYFBI.

Both Moore’s relationship to Corsi, and his role at TruePundit-as the college librarian of rogue anti Clinton FBI leaks-dictate that he learned of Smith’s successful gambit pretty early in the game-quite plausibly these were the kind of sources he was reporting on.

End UPDATE

Indeed, the more you listen to Comey the more it seems that he himself believes a lot of fake news-perhaps gathered from TP among other fake news sites-remember when he justified the Comey Presser on what Fox News was saying about Tarmacgate?

UPDATE: Comey also seems to still think the fake Russian document isn’t fake

Remember his bizarre claim in his Congressional testimony in May, 2017 that Huma Abedin systematically forwarded emails from Hillary Clinton to Weiner?

FN: Do we need this quote here as we have it in other chapters?

“FBI director James Comey generated national headlines last week with his dramatic testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, explaining his “incredibly painful” decision to go public about the Hillary Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop.

Perhaps Comey’s most surprising revelation was that Huma Abedin — Weiner’s wife and a top Clinton deputy — had made “a regular practice” of forwarding “hundreds and thousands” of Clinton messages to her husband, “some of which contain classified information.” Comey testified that Abedin had done this so that the disgraced former congressman could print them out for her boss. (Weiner’s laptop was seized after he came under criminal investigation for sex crimes, following a media report about his online relationship with a teenager.)”

FBI officials have privately acknowledged that Comey misstated what Abedin did and what the FBI investigators found. On Monday, the FBI was said to be preparing to correct the record by sending a letter to Congress later this week. But that plan now appears on hold, with the bureau undecided about what to do.”

FN: ProPublica later updated their story when the FBI put out an official correction of Comey’s absurd testimony.

UPDATE:

FN: Chapter Comey’s howler on Huma’s emails-Chapter Why the Comey Letter?

https://www.propublica.org/article/problems-with-fbi-clinton-email-investigation-went-well-beyond-comey

https://www.propublica.org/article/comeys-testimony-on-huma-abedin-forwarding-emails-was-inaccurate

Another case of Comey either believing or claiming to believe something fantastical. But look at the history-Comey actually requested to work on the Whitewater Committee. Enough said

End of UPDATE

According to two sources familiar with the matter — including one in law enforcement — Abedin forwarded only a handful of Clinton emails to her husband for printing — not the “hundreds and thousands” cited by Comey. It does not appear Abedin made “a regular practice” of doing so. Other officials said it was likely that most of the emails got onto the computer as a result of backups of her BlackBerry.

FN: Chapter Unreported Background of the Comey Letter reveals they didn’t get there through backups of her BlackBerry but because Peter Smith’s intel connections at NYPD put them there.

End FN

It was not clear how many, if any, of the forwarded emails were among the 12 “classified” emails Comey said had been found on Weiner’s laptop. None of the messages carried classified markings at the time they were sent.

ProPublica is reporting a story on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton emails and raised questions with government officials last week about possible inaccuracies in Comey’s statements about Abedin.

It could not be learned how the mistake occurred. The FBI and Abedin declined ProPublica’s requests for comment on the director’s misstatements.

Indeed that’s the 64 million dollar question and we know no more today than then regarding how Comey got it this wrong.

My hypothesis? As developed in Chapter A, he’s just an unreliable narrator on all matters Emailgate as the truth is so incriminating for him-both for his terrible judgment and his major violations of DOJ rules and policy.

But what’s striking about Comey’s false testimony is how similar it sounds to that TruePundit article-we quoted from Silverman above. Here’s more directly from the TruePundit website. 

FN: This TruePundit piece that TP-plausibly-claims are based on both NYPD and FBI sources insists that this is not about rogue agents:

Is the Clinton Foundation federal probe the work of FBI agents gone rogue? No. The FBI agents, with approval from headquarters in Washington D.C., have been sanctioned to continue the investigation, ignoring directives from Attorney General Loretta Lynch and her underlings, including Leslie Caldwell, Lynch’s point running the Justice Department’s criminal division.

Neither Lynch nor Caldwell were available for comment.

The FBI’s probe of the Clinton Foundation is actually a compartmentalized investigation. Field offices in Los Angeles and New York are spearheading the case but other offices are involved and contributing, sources said.”

Suggesting that these rogue FBI agents understand the word ‘rogue’ about as well as Comey understands the words Hatch Act-Comey keeps boasting that he couldn’t allow the fact that his Letter changed the result of the election to effect his decision when-as Schoenberg argues; Chapter A-that’s the intent of the Hatch Act-not to be agnostic as to wether actions of the FBI impact an election but rather not take actions that impact an election-hence the 60 day rule…

Similarly these rogue FBI agents seem not to get that by ignoring directives from the DOJ that IS the definition of going rogue. Though to be sure, I agree with the IG report at least in the respect that it was also a failure of Loretta Lynch and Sally Yates in not reigning Comey in-with a direct order if necessary.

And in a sense TP was right-it’s hard to call them ‘rogue’ when it’s such a large percentage at the FBI that hated the Clintons. Indeed, with the rogue Clinton Foundation investigation, the insubordination wasn’t about individual agents but the agency itself-the Washington leadership TruePundit references was Andy McCabe himself-see Chapter McCabe for more.

End FN

 

End FN

This is just yet another of the many conundrums, the many riddles wrapped inside mysteries inside enigmas of Comey’s supervision of Emailgate-like why did he violate the rules to do the Presser, why did he violate the rules to do the Letter, why did it take him a month to ask for a search warrant, why did he do the Letter before getting a search warrant-he said he had to correct the record but this too was wrong as he wouldn’t know if there was anything to correct until he applied for the warrant.

Why did he wait three more days to get the warrant after the Letter, why did he force McCabe’s recusal because his wife took donations from Democrats but not himself who’d donated to both Obama’s opponents-and spent 20 years investigating the Clintons-and locked up Martha Stewart-the substitute Hillary Clinton after she got away from Ken Starr and Brett Kavanaugh in the 1990s-under dubious premises?

Was there ever probable cause in the first place seeing as being able to prove intent was obviously always unlikely. Why did it take so long to close the investigation once it became clear-though in reality it was always clear even before the investigation was opened-that they would not be able to establish intent?

Why has his explanations for the Presser-and the Letter-kept changing? Why did he give-or at least in one explanation-claim to give the Presser based on a fake Russian document? Did he know the document was a fake or did he believe it was real? And why did he falsely testify that Abedin had systematically sent HRC’s emails to Anthony Weiner?

UPDATE: I’ve come to think that the reason Comey made such an absurd claim about Huma’s emails is related to why he continued to make such absurd claims about the Russian disinfo document-he really believed it-just like as Schoenberg persuasuively argued Comey reopened/didn’t reopen Emailgate and dropping the Comey Letter 11 days before the election because he honestly believed “Clinton was a criminal that hadn’t been caught/”

It’s also related to why Comey opened such a badly predicated investigation in the first place-and perhaps knowingly fudged it into an UNSUB to sneak Emailgate through the backdoor.

See Chapter 23 Years of Clinton Hunting.

For more on this question see Chapter Comey’s Fake Russian Document.

 

License

But Her Emails: Why all Roads Still Lead to Russia Copyright © by nymikesax. All Rights Reserved.

Share This Book