[Official] Nunes memo released

[charrob]

Andrew Napolitano Calls Out FISA Court Charade:

There is plenty of reason to think that regular United States courts too readily allow surveilling people and searching their homes and property. But, in the US court authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), there is not even a pretense of observing Fourth Amendment restraints. The result is what many Americans who demanded a Bill of Rights be adopted in the early days of the United States sought to prevent from arising in America — routine, sweeping judicial decrees for invading people’s privacy based on little or no credible reason to suspect the people committed criminal acts.

In a Monday interview at Fox Business, legal scholar and former New Jersey state Judge Andrew Napolitano called out the FISA court for its extreme flaunting of constitutional restraints. Presenting a scenario where he is woken in the middle of the night by a call from the courthouse regarding an urgent warrant request that the state police are waiting in the lobby of his building to discuss with him, Napolitano illustrates the difference between the process to obtain a FISA court warrant and the process he employed as a judge. Napolitano explains.

And they come into my living room, and we spend an hour going through what they have and how they can demonstrate to me that I should sign a piece of paper letting them break down somebody’s door at three in the morning in order to get evidence. It’s a give and take and a give and take, and I am satisfied that it is more likely than not that behind that door is evidence of a serious crime. The court has to go through that kind of give and take, give and take, give and take when they come to you with an emergency application for a warrant.

If the court blithely accepts what the government gives, it’s as much the court’s fault as the government. If the government knows that the court grants 99.9 percent of all warrants requested, which is an unbelievable number — a number never heard of in my career, then the government’s going to get lazy and sloppy, because they are going to walk in there saying 'we’re going to get this thing, we always do.'

Watch Napolitano’s complete interview here:

The super-accommodative approach of the FISA court also opens the door to easily obtaining permission to search and surveil in order to fish for evidence of a criminal act to pin on someone, for information helpful in advancing an individual or company’s financial gain, for information the potential disclosure of which can be held over an individual to exert influence on him, or for information that can be leaked to the media for purposes including influencing an election, a congressional vote, or the confirmation decision on a presidential nominee.

While the FISA court’s activities are secret, the court did admit in 2013 that it had, during its several decades in existence, approved over 99.9 percent of the US government’s surveillance requests.

Napolitano is a member of the Ron Paul Institute Advisory Board.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives...court-charade/

It Can Happen Here

"The #4thAmendment prohibits warrantless searches and requires probable cause of crime as the sole trigger for judges to sign search warrants," says Judge Andrew Napolitano. #FISA only requires probable cause relating to a foreign agent on one end of a phone call — a far lower standard — to trigger a warrant. The government has convinced the FISC that it should grant warrants based on probable cause of talking to someone who has ever spoken to a foreign person, whether an agent of a foreign government or an innocent foreign bookseller.

That judicially created standard is so far afield from the Fourth Amendment as to render it legally erroneous and profoundly #unconstitutional. Yet the FISA expansion that the president signed into law last month — after the debate during which House Intelligence Committee #Republicans intentionally remained mute about their allegations of FISA abuses — purports to make this Stasi-like level of #surveillance lawful.

The political use of intelligence data makes the owner of the data a serious threat to personal #liberty, and it renders his instruments monstrous.

More here: https://tenthamendmentcenter.com/201...n-happen-here/

I wonder if Carter Page sues the FISA Court for rubber stamping his surveillance if another Federal Court, all the way up to the Supreme Court, could overturn the FISA law that was just voted on last month for being unconstitutional?

[Jan2017]

Very good calling out George W especially during Obama's 8years -
Bush43 . . . mumm . . . total silence . . . the cat had W's tongue . . . and crickets -
but now with the 45th President in office - W is on foreign soil talking about DACA.

Yeah, JEB! took quite a beating in the GOP nomination race and now in 2017-18 the older Bush brother
has to defend the Ex-Florida Governor the very one who allowed Saudis learning to fly planes and not land . . .
Jeb! territory sadddd
remember the fantasy football highlights . . . Jeb! is 7 - 0 in fantasy football bragging at the UColorado debate

[Jan2017]

I wonder if Carter Page sues the FISA Court for rubber stamping his surveillance if another Federal Court, all the way up to the Supreme Court, could overturn the FISA law that was just voted on last month for being unconstitutional?

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) was established by Congress in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.
The role of the FISC is to provide judicial oversight of Intelligence Community activities in a classified setting.

The FISA "classified" Court - to use their own language from the first en banc ever decision of that Court in November 2017 -
was a 6-5 decision overturning an earlier (2013?) FISC order against the ACLU and Yale Law School, granting ""standing to sue" for actions under the Freedom of Information Act for people who have damages.

Carter Page and Snowden and some others(?) seem like they'd at least have "standing to sue" FISC in a US District Court,
a US Circuit Court of Appeals to appeal an adverse decision, and ultimately the US Supreme Court granting writ of an error - in light of the recent and novel decision.

En Banc Surveillance Court Holds ACLU, Yale Have Standing to Seek Data Collection Rulings

The 6-5 decision by the court is the first-ever en banc ruling to reverse such a holding.
“Whatever the merits of Movants' suit, we conclude that they have asserted a sufficient injury-in-fact to pursue it,”
said U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, writing for the majority.

https://www.courthousenews.com/en-ba...ction-rulings/

[Jan2017]

http://www.complex.com/life/2018/02/...ams-nunes-memo
Even Edward Snowden Is Slamming the Devin Nunes Memo

No need for the Zippy Group to ever defend the egregious posting #262 on page 9 herewith - because the Zips can't.
neg rep

Zippy wrong AGAIN? What are the odds?

- or -

Zips interpretation of what "a letter from the White House" means to them - why (?)
RPF needs to be dumbed-down by Zippyjuan (?)

[charrob]

The FISA "classified" Court - to use their own language from the first en banc ever decision of that Court in November 2017 -
was a 6-5 decision overturning an earlier (2013?) FISC order against the ACLU and Yale Law School, granting ""standing to sue" for actions under the Freedom of Information Act for people who have damages.

Carter Page and Snowden and some others(?) seem like they'd at least have "standing to sue" FISC in a US District Court,
a US Circuit Court of Appeals to appeal an adverse decision, and ultimately the US Supreme Court granting writ of an error - in light of the recent and novel decision.

En Banc Surveillance Court Holds ACLU, Yale Have Standing to Seek Data Collection Rulings

https://www.courthousenews.com/en-ba...ction-rulings/

Thanks. Would be nice to see this happen. Not sure anything else will be able to reverse the practices of this unconstitutional court and the destruction of our 4th amendment. Napolitano stated the FISA Court does not have to prove probable cause of a crime to get a warrant; he said all they have to prove is probable cause of talking to someone outside of this country and, his example, that talking to his cousin in Florence Italy about a recipe for making mozzarella would be enough for a FISA Court to get a warrant on him! So, theoretically under current law, the dossier was not needed: all that was needed was proof that Carter Page spoke with someone outside this country. Yes Comey signing that the dossier was verifiable and accurate to the best of his knowledge was a crime, but I hope that this investigation does not end here because imho the far greater crime is that the whole FISA Court is unconstitutional. Nabbing the current band of criminals might feel good, but if the structure of this unconstitutional court is not changed, we'll only see another band of criminals take advantage of it in the future. And if the legislative branch is not willing to change it (and considering their recent votes show they are not), it seems the only way it might have a chance of being changed is through a law suit from someone wrongly damaged by this.

[acptulsa]

Raimondo's salivating hard. I hope he's not promising more than Nunes can deliver.

https://original.antiwar.com/justin/...troy-republic/

You don’t need any special analytical abilities to understand “the memo” and its meaning. A simple reading reveals that allegations of skullduggery peeking by the Obama administration during the presidential campaign were entirely accurate: the memo just filled us in on the details. And while the debate has largely been over whether the proper legal procedures were followed by the FBI and administration officials in spying on Carter Page – someone only marginally connected to the Trump campaign – the real question is: why were they sneaking around Page at all?

Oh, he claimed to be an “informal advisor” to the Russian government: he had business interests in Russia and met with Russian officials. Furthermore, and most importantly, he opposed the anti-Russian hysteria that permeates official Washington, and he often said – in public speeches as well as privately – that US sanctions against Russia are a mistake.

But so what? Since when is it illegal to hold these views?

Page was never a “Russian agent,” and the FBI never proved that he was or is. Instead, they submitted that phony BuzzFeed “dossier” to the FISA court as “evidence” justifying their hot pursuit of him on more than one occasion. They did so without telling the judge who paid for the dossier (it was the Clinton campaign, as Trump claimed when this first came out) and they withheld other important details about its provenance – including that it was written by Christopher Steele, a “former” British intelligence agent who openly expressed a passionate desire to see Trump defeated. Nor had they verified the information in the dossier related to Page, because they “didn’t have time,” as former DNI chief James Clapper has said on numerous occasions.

Page was targeted and the information gleaned from listening in on his phone conversations, reading his email, and god knows what other sneaky intrusions, was leaked to the media in a concerted campaign to influence the outcome of the election. So, yes, there was “collusion” – except it wasn’t a pact between Putin and Trump but rather an alliance between Hillary’s campaign and the national security bureaucracy to get her elected. In effect, the top leadership of the FBI became an adjunct of the Clinton campaign – and, after Trump won, they executed a plan to frame him for “collusion” and oust him.

When Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes announced he was going public with it, the Democrats and their Republican Never-Trump allies said it meant the national security of the United States would be put in mortal danger. They trotted out the old “sources and methods” argument, which, it turned out, did not apply to the memo – because it just laid out the bare facts, and revealed neither sources nor methods. (Unless one is talking about the political methodology of the FBI scam, which involved sneaking, peaking, and then leaking).

The Deep State-Democrat fallback position is that Carter Page is really beside the point, because the real genesis of the Russia-gate probe was the investigation into 28-year-old George Papadopoulos, an “energy consultant” even more marginal to the Trump campaign than Page.

According to the New York Times, after being introduced to a number of Russian contacts by a Professor Joseph Mifsud – supposedly a “Maltese academic” who has since completely disappeared – the mysterious pedagogue told Papadopoulos that the Russians had “thousands” of incriminating emails that would damage Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. Although there’s no evidence Papadopoulos communicated this information to the Trump campaign, the young would-be mover-and-shaker got drunk one night in a London pub and supposedly told an Australian diplomat about the emails: it’s not known whether the Australian had a role in getting him in a talkative mood, but we are told the two met due to the efforts of an Israeli diplomat in London.

If this sounds like a setup to you, then you win the door prize: your very own copy of What Happened, now going for fifty cents at the remainder table.

The Russia-gate conspiracy theorists believe that the Trump campaign somehow had a hand in either procuring or publishing the Clinton/Podesta emails – even though no one has ever produced any evidence of this. Aside from this important lack, there are some big problems with the conspiracist thesis. To begin with, if the Trump people knew about the DNC/Podesta emails in advance, why didn’t they utilize this vital information before WikiLeaks published them? And what purpose would it serve the Russians to let the Trump camp in on the operation, and risk exposure in the process? If they wanted to help Trump, all they had to do was make sure the emails were published. The collusion theory makes no sense – but, then again, Russia-gate has never made much sense.

While the most fanatical anti-Trump types simply denied everything in the memo, the Beltway “libertarians” who hate Trump’s guts — and the honest liberals like Glenn Greenwald who also hate Trump’s guts but who have a conscience and won’t go along with the Russia-gate hoax – were reduced to finger-wagging in response to the memo’s release. Why, they asked, did these very same people, like Rep. Nunes, vote to expand the Deep State’s power to spy on Americans right before the memo came out?

The question answers itself. As Rep. Thomas Massie put it: “Who made the decision to withhold evidence of FISA abuse until after Congress voted to renew FISA program?” More than a few votes would no doubt have been cast differently, and perhaps the outcome would’ve been different. Certainly the debate would’ve been more extensive, and much more interesting.

What’s exciting, to me at least, is the promise by Nunes that this is just the start of the revelations. Next up: the key role played by the State Department in the plot to destroy our republic and hand power over to unelected Deep State bureaucrats. And this means the important – perhaps decisive – part played by foreign actors in all this will be exposed to the light of day. If you thought there was howling about the first Nunes memo, wait until you hear the screams of pain coming from the foreign lobbyists and their “American” sock puppets over Part Two of the Nunes narrative. The real story of who is subverting our republic – and colluding with foreigners to accomplish that goal – is about to come out.

I can hardly wait!

This isn’t about Trump. You may hate him. You may love him. That’s irrelevant. What matters is that a powerful group of Washington insiders is trying to exercise its assumed veto power over who gets to inhabit the White House – and that is impermissible as long as the republic endures.

[acptulsa]

Judge NAP's turn. What I want to know is, we were ready to embargo Russia over playing in our elections, and maybe even go to war. What are we going to do to Great Britain? And the FBI? Surely in a Republic, we can do something about the FBI meddling illegally in elections, right?

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news...ce-on-us-soil/

We remain embroiled in a debate over the nature and extent of our own government’s spying on us. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was enacted in 1978 as a response to the unlawful government spying of the Watergate era, was a lawful means for the government to engage in foreign surveillance on U.S. soil, but it has morphed into unchecked government spying on ordinary Americans.

The journey that domestic spying has taken in 40 years has been one long steady march of massive increase in size and scope. The federal government now employs more than 60,000 people to spy on all Americans, including the White House, the Pentagon, the federal courts and one another. The National Security Agency and the intelligence arm of the FBI have 24/7 access to the computers of all telecoms and computer service providers in the U.S. And certain politicians have access to whatever the NSA and the FBI possess.

Last week, we witnessed a new turn as politicians engaged in cherry-picking snippets from classified raw intelligence data that support their political cases — pro-Trump and anti-Trump.

Raw intelligence data consists of digital versions of telephone conversations and copies of text messages, emails and other communications, as well as fiber-optic internet traffic (legal, medical and banking records, for example) and secret testimony and briefings intended only for the eyes and ears of those who possess a security clearance.

The surveillance state is now here.

The Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee fired the first salvo by releasing a memo derived from classified raw intelligence, which they claimed would show a conspiracy in the Obama Department of Justice, including the FBI, to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign and pass along the fruits of that spying to the Democrats. The issue they chose to highlight is the DOJ application to a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge for surveillance on Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to candidate Trump who once boasted that he also advised the Kremlin.

The memo’s authors wrote about intelligence data they did not personally see; they selectively extracted and purported to summarize raw intelligence data but quoted none of it verbatim; they intentionally sat on their conclusions that the feds regularly have abused FISA authorities throughout the congressional debate to expand FISA; and a principal drafter of the memo — Rep. Trey Gowdy — advises that the raw data he saw and the memo he wrote have nothing to do with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the president.

The Republican memo also reveals that former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier that accuses Mr. Trump of pre-presidential money laundering and grossly inappropriate personal behavior but has many parts that have not been publicly verified, was a “longtime FBI source,” and a summary of his work was part of the DOJ’s application for continued surveillance of Mr. Page.

That quoted phrase is today a major headache for the DOJ, as the American and British governments, which regularly share intelligence and occasionally spy for each other, have agreed not to recruit the services of each other’s agents. But the FBI obviously recruited Mr. Steele. If Mr. Steele was an FBI asset while still a British spy — if he was spying for the FBI and MI6 at the same time — he may be exposed to a criminal prosecution in Britain.

The Democrats on the committee have written their own memo, which the committee voted unanimously to release. It will be up to the president to permit or bar its full or partial release. The Democrats claim that their memo will show that the DOJ was candid and truthful when it sought a FISA surveillance warrant on Mr. Page and that the application for the renewal included far more than Mr. Steele’s tainted work.

Why should anyone care about these political games?

The loss of liberty rarely comes about overnight or in one stroke. In a democracy, that loss is normally a slow process, often pushed along by well-intentioned folks who do not even realize until it is too late that they have created a monster. FISA is a monster. It began as a means of surveilling foreign agents in the U.S., and today it is used for surveilling any American at any time.

If you call a bookstore in Florence from a telephone in New Jersey, the government’s computers will be alerted. A federal agent will download the digital copy of your conversation, even though it was only about ordering a book. Then that communication may be used to justify surveillance of you whenever you talk to anyone else, in the U.S. or in any foreign country.

This is blatantly unconstitutional, and it is often fruitless. And we know it can happen to anyone.

The Supreme Court has ruled that electronic surveillance constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. That amendment prohibits warrantless searches and requires probable cause of crime as the sole trigger for judges to sign search warrants. FISA only requires probable cause relating to a foreign agent on one end of a phone call — a far lower standard — to trigger a warrant. The government has convinced the FISC that it should grant warrants based on probable cause of talking to someone who has ever spoken to a foreign person, whether an agent of a foreign government or an innocent foreign bookseller.

That judicially created standard is so far afield from the Fourth Amendment as to render it legally erroneous and profoundly unconstitutional. Yet the FISA expansion that the president signed into law last month — bafter the debate during which House Intelligence Committee Republicans intentionally remained mute about their allegations of FISA abuses — purports to make this Stasi-like level of surveillance lawful.

The political use of intelligence data makes the owner of the data a serious threat to personal liberty, and it renders his instruments monstrous.

[pcosmar]

I am not finding the "perp walk" videos.

I am observing evidence of serious criminal behavior on the part of many.

I am not seeing arrests being made.

[devil21]

I am not finding the "perp walk" videos.

I am observing evidence of serious criminal behavior on the part of many.

I am not seeing arrests being made.

Arrests imply that the perps consent to jurisdiction of prosecution. They wrote the rules of said prosecutions. Like tax code, the loopholes are there if you wrote them to be there. Ascend your thinking.

[goldenequity]

Sunday review w/ Devin Nunes... Dem 'memo', future indictments...

[Todd]

Raimondo's salivating hard. I hope he's not promising more than Nunes can deliver.

Thought the same thing after reading that. Raimondo is a great writer, and he used to use his forecasting on a limited basis. But he seems pretty solid about all of this and I want to trust.... But I fear nothing will come of this because of all the obfuscation and propaganda.

[timosman]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...-and-russians/

By Ed Rogers, February 13


^{The Russia probe got its start with a drunken conversation, an ex-spy, WikiLeaks and a distracted FBI. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)}

While the media is filled with stories and theories about Trump’s interactions — or lack thereof — with Russia, not enough attention is being paid to revelations about pro-Hillary Clinton operatives’ use of opposition research that ostensibly came from Russia. With the Democrats unable to govern and lacking much of an affirmative agenda, they want Russia to be the story. Yet with each passing day, more seems to be revealed that not only undercuts the absolute faith Democrats have in the Trump-Russia collusion narrative but also demonstrates just how much they did and how far they were willing to go to establish an improper or embarrassing link between Trump and Russia.

There is no better illustration of this than what we now know went on between Clinton allies Sidney Blumenthal and Jonathan Winer and the author of the infamous dossier, Christopher Steele. We know that Steele was paid with Clinton campaign money and that he was “passionate about [Trump] not being president.” We know that Winer, an old Washington hand and former John Kerry staffer was Steele’s man at the State Department and, incredibly, admitted to distributing more than 100 of Steele’s commercial business documents within senior offices at the State Department. Soon enough, we will know who Steele’s clients were that paid for their views to be disseminated within the Obama administration and what Russian interests were involved. And by the way, it turns out Blumenthal, a long-time specialist in the political dark arts, had his own anti-Trump dossier, authored by political activist Cody Shearer, which he gave to Winer; Winer passed it to Steele, and Steele passed it to the FBI. Presto. Keeping someone between the political operatives and the FBI: That’s how real pros do it in the swamp.

Anyway, you would think this operation would warrant appropriate news coverage and multiple follow-up questions from the mainstream media. But instead, it is mostly crickets. Compare the coverage of the Blumenthal-Steele-Winer troika and their work to influence the FBI and supply anti-Trump campaign dirt to the media with the coverage of a single meeting that took place with a Russian lawyer and Trump campaign personnel. Ask yourself which is most significant: Donald Trump Jr. — the hapless, amateur son of then-candidate Trump — having a one-off, stray meeting in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer who perhaps promised, but did not deliver, compromising information on Clinton, or Winer, Blumenthal and foreign national Steele all playing a role in getting campaign dirt through Steele’s and State Department channels into the hands of the FBI? With all the breathless scrutiny surrounding Trump Jr.’s meeting, one would think there would at least be a modicum of interest in Blumenthal, Winer and Steele.

The idea that the Democrats were the ones who solicited and utilized Russian-supplied, damning information about Trump instead of Trump using Russian-supplied, damning information about Clinton is something that Trump’s opponents cannot process. So, today, when the Democrats and their allies in the media insist that we need to know what the Russians did to influence the election and interfere in the democratic process, it is fair to ask which Russians are they talking about? Are they talking about the Russians who were solicited by Steele and his Democrat paymasters? What were the Russians’ interests and were any of them paying Steele? (A new story links Steele to Putin ally Oleg Deripaska.) And what about the sources that Shearer solicited for the anti-Trump dossier he gave to Blumenthal? It seems that there were a lot more meetings with Russians and information collected from Russians on behalf of the Clinton campaign than there ever was on behalf of the Trump campaign.

It may be difficult for Democrats to accept this, but their outrage towards the president doesn’t change the fact that neither he nor his campaign colluded with the Russians. And it must be difficult knowing that more evidence or downright admissions keep surfacing pointing to Democrats facilitating Russian influence in the 2016 campaign. Russian fingerprints are all over the work of Blumenthal, Winer and Steele. Exploring their actions must be a priority for the media.

[Swordsmyth]

The legal waves created by President Donald Trump’s decision to declassify a Republican memo suggesting FBI wrongdoing continued to crash ashore on Thursday, with a federal judge saying the president’s move had undermined government arguments that it should be able to keep mum about its ongoing investigations.
During a hearing on a bid by BuzzFeed to get more information about how a so-called dossier compiled by a former British spy was handled, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta grew frustrated with a Justice Department lawyer who argued that Trump’s declassification order did not alter the contours of the legal dispute.



Mehta said the government would normally be entitled to deference in asserting the need to keep its investigative work under wraps, but perhaps no longer with respect to the dossier.
“This isn’t the ordinary case,” Mehta told a Justice Department lawyer, Anjali Motgi. “I don’t know of any time the president has declassified the fact of a counterintelligence investigation. That’s going to be a hard sell given what the president has done. … This is a new frontier and it has an impact.”

More at:https://www.politico.com/story/2018/...losures-415596

[milgram]

https://theconservativetreehouse.com...isc-documents/

FISA judge refuses (for now) to release relevant documents to Goodlatte and Nunes, claiming that the DOJ should release them. Goodlatte requested the court documents and Nunes requested the court transcript.

The Legislative Branch created the FISA Court system; however, the secret court resides in the Judicial Branch. Judge Collyer is taking both requests under consideration and asks both Chairman to consider seeking relief from the Executive Branch with requests directly to the DOJ for the majority of the information they seek.

However, there is an underlying issue not being discussed within the communication – yet visible in the corner amid their engagement. That issue is the possibility the DOJ may have modified the FISA documents within its possession in an effort to hide from congress the trail of a conspiracy against a presidential candidate and an incoming administration.

In essence, the FISA documents held by the court *may not be* identical to the FISA documents released by the Department of Justice. Chairman Goodlatte is seeking to rule out that possibility.

[Swordsmyth]

The Nunes Memo and Vince Foster

The memorandum prepared by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes contains a couple of names that are very familiar to those of us who have followed the cover-up in the case of the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., from its beginning. Here are the key passages:

The Carter Page FISA application also cited extensively a September 23, 2016, Yahoo News article by Michael Isikoff, which focuses on Page’s July 2016 trip to Moscow. This article does not corroborate the [Christopher] Steele dossier because it is derived from information leaked by Steele himself to Yahoo News. The Page FISA application incorrectly assesses that Steele did not directly provide information to Yahoo News. Steele has admitted in British court filings that he met with Yahoo News—and several other outlets—in September 2016 at the direction of Fusion GPS. Perkins Coie was aware of Steele’s initial media contacts because they hosted at least one meeting in Washington DC in 2016 with Steele and Fusion GPS where this matter was discussed.

----

Steele was suspended and then terminated as an FBI source for what the FBI defines as the most serious of violations—an unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI in an October 30, 2016, Mother Jones article by David Corn. Steele should have been terminated for his previous undisclosed contacts with Yahoo and other outlets in September—before the Page application was submitted to the FISC in October—but Steele improperly concealed from and lied to the FBI about those contacts.
More at: http://dcdave.com/article5/180205.htm

[timosman]

FISA judge refuses (for now) to release relevant documents to Goodlatte and Nunes, claiming that the DOJ should release them. Goodlatte requested the court documents and Nunes requested the court transcript.

Wonder if the versions are the same?

[Jan2017]

The Russia probe got its start with a drunken conversation, an ex-spy, WikiLeaks and a distracted FBI. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

"It all starts with a night of drinking"

[Swordsmyth]

Top Justice Department official Bruce Ohr failed to disclose that Fusion GPS was paying his wife and didn’t seek a conflict of interest waiver from the department.

Falsifying government ethics forms and documents can result in jail time if an individual is convicted.

In order to trigger the Russia investigation, Fusion GPS likely used Nellie Ohr to give the dossier to Bruce Ohr, who then used his senior status at the DOJ to lay the foundation for the Russia probe.

The FBI then took the dossier from the DOJ and obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on Carter Page, a volunteer to Trump’s 2016 campaign.
This paved the way for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to take over the Russia investigation.
That’s called collusion, and it’s not a coincidence that Ohr lied on two separate occasions about his wife’s role at Fusion GPS.

More at: https://conservativedailypost.com/ob...om-fusion-gps/

[Jan2017]

The FBI then took the dossier from the DOJ and obtained a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on Carter Page, a volunteer to Trump’s 2016 campaign.

I understood that there was also one/another route to the FBI for the Steele dossier -
it was given to a Senator, one John McCain of Arizona who handed off to the FBI.

As far as Vince Foster, he worked with/for Hillary Clinton but not familaR WITH THE NAMES CONNECTED.