Tag: conspiracy

“A massive scandal brewing”

Thunder is beginning to rumble in the mainstream media:

During the financial crisis, the federal government bailed out banks it declared “too big to fail.” Fearing their bankruptcy might trigger economic Armageddon, the feds propped them up with taxpayer cash.

Something similar is happening now at the FBI, with the Washington wagons circling the agency to protect it from charges of corruption. This time, the appropriate tag line is “too big to believe.”

Yet each day brings credible reports suggesting there is a massive scandal involving the top ranks of America’s premier law enforcement agency. The reports, which feature talk among agents of a “secret society” and suddenly missing text messages, point to the existence both of a cabal dedicated to defeating Donald Trump in 2016 and of a plan to let Hillary Clinton skate free in the classified email probe.

If either one is true — and I believe both probably are — it would mean FBI leaders betrayed the nation by abusing their powers in a bid to pick the president.

More support for this view involves the FBI’s use of the Russian dossier on Trump that was paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. It is almost certain that the FBI used the dossier to get FISA court warrants to spy on Trump associates, meaning it used the opposition research of the party in power to convince a court to let it spy on the candidate of the other party — likely without telling the court of the dossier’s political link.

Even worse, there is growing reason to believe someone in President Barack Obama’s administration turned over classified information about Trump to the Clinton campaign.

Notice that the headline is that “evidence suggests” rather than a reliance upon rumors, whispers, reports, or insiders. Which means that unlike the special investigator’s search for collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, there is almost certainly a substantive there there.

An FBI informant has apparently informed Congress that a secret society at the FBI was holding secret meetings off-site after the election of Donald Trump. On Special Report with Bret Baier Tuesday evening, Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) called it “corruption of the highest levels of the FBI.”

So much for the FBI’s once-pristine reputation. The FBI is now circling the wagons, as is the NSA, despite what they once said about the Nixon White House and how the problem isn’t so much the original crime as the coverup. The problem in this case appears to be that the crimes are so bad, and so serious, that they are even worse than those that were subsequently committed in the coverup.

Daily Meme Wars

I’ve been a bit sporadic about the meme wars lately, since not being on Twitter has tended to make me forget about social media entirely, but now that the holidays are over I’m getting back to the meme factory and will be sending memes like these out again on a daily basis.

Put them on Twitter, put them on Facebook, just put them out there, period. It’s a great way of effectively countering the constant propaganda pressure on ordinary news consumers. To get your daily meme wars in your morning email, sign up here. Because it’s easy to ignore an argument, especially if you’re a rhetoric-speaker, it’s much harder to ignore images such as the one below popping up in your timeline. Especially if you don’t know what it means.

The “secret society”

Seditious parties in the FBI may be hiding text messages, but they won’t be able to keep the FISA memo under wraps:

There is serious talk on Capitol Hill about the appointment of a second special counsel amid several new bombshell revelations swirling around the Trump/Russia probe. First, there are the allegations of shocking and substantial government surveillance abuses under President Obama outlined in the FISA abuse memo. Secondly, the FBI lost five months of key text messages between the anti-Trump/pro-Clinton FBI officials Peter Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page. And now there’s talk of a “secret society” of officials within the FBI that apparently met the day after the election of Donald J. Trump to plot against the president-elect….

According to Fox News, Nunes, Gowdy and Goodlatte are in the process of going through the steps necessary to release the four-page FISA memo and intend to see it released to the public by early February.

The FBI has demanded to see a copy of the memo, but so far — understandably —  the Intelligence Committee has declined to show them their hand. Republicans believe that publishing the memo will but pressure on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appoint a second special counsel, Fox News reported.

Reps Gowdy and Ratcliffe (R-TX) were on Fox News’ “The Story with Martha MacCallum” Monday night to talk about the latest developments.

Rep. Ratcliffe said that former FBI director James Comey needs to come back to Capitol Hill to testify again under oath on the question of when the decision to exonerate former secretary of State Hillary Clinton was made. The latest batch of text messages between Strzok and Page suggests that Comey was coordinating with Attorney General Lynch on the decision well ahead of his July 5 press conference.

“It’s really clear to me that the decision was made in May of 2016 — two months before the press conference,” Gowdy said. “Of course Loretta Lynch knew he wasn’t going to be charged. Everyone except the public knew that she was not going to be charged.”

“We knew that Strzok and Page had an intense anti-Trump bias and that’s okay so long as they check it at the door and do their job,” Ratcliffe said. “But we learned today in the thousands of text messages that we reviewed that perhaps they may not have done that.”

Ratcliffe went on to mention one particular text message that referenced a “secret society” at the Bureau. “We know about this insurance policy that was referenced in trying to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president,” he began. “We learned today about information in the immediate aftermath of his election that there may have been a ‘secret society’ of folks within the Department of Justice and the FBI to include Page and Strzok that would be working against him.”

This goes well beyond basic criminality. We’re getting into serious sedition, high crimes, and treason territory here. And yes, this is definitely Storm-related. The FBI and NSA aren’t “accidentally losing” hundreds of text messages and emails because nothing is at stake.

The Conservative Treehouse explains the strategy called “the Big Ugly”, of which the aforementioned FISA memo is a key part of informing the public in a manner it can digest:

Nunes, Grassley and Goodlatte are working in concert, each with a specific attack strategy that targets the larger swamp defense. This week they began the three-pronged attack we call “THE BIG UGLY“.

The Big Ugly is the wrecking ball that will shatter the front line swamp defenses and allow the draining to begin. The plan for this strategy was developed almost a year ago after Nunes realized how the compartmented intelligence would be used to block sunlight.

ODNI Dan Coats, the man who declassified the original FISA court opinion, NSA Director Mike Rogers, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, FBI Director Christopher Wray, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Asst. AG Rod Rosenstein have each played a significant role in preparing the landscape and armory for this conflict.

Congressional allies like Jim Jordan and Ron DeSantis will be working toward messaging and clearing the fog from the media.

It is not accidental that Ron DeSantis has asked Speaker Ryan to declassify everything…. only a week before Devin Nunes announces his request for the full house to see everything declassified and without redaction. These are Big Ugly cannon shots into the heart of deception.  The summary of the classified FISA-702 abuse, and the subsequent unmasking therein, lies at the heart of the strategy to use a four-page summary memo to inform the public of the historic issues.

Another oopsie: NSA edition

It’s really remarkable how these Federal agencies keep accidentally erasing data that might prove incriminating.

Surveillance data the National Security Agency vowed to preserve related to pending lawsuits has been erased, and the agency did not take several precautions it told a federal court it would take to ensure the data did not get deleted, court filings reveal.

Court orders from 2007 have required the NSA to maintain the data related to certain surveillance efforts that were under scrutiny, after it was revealed President George W. Bush directed warrantless wiretapping among international communications following the 9/11 attacks. The NSA has provided updates to the court regarding how it has followed the orders.

But the NSA informed U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White that the agency did not keep content of internet communications seized from 2001 to 2007 under the Bush administration in a filing Thursday night, and in a submission last year, according to Politico. Additionally, the NSA said backup tapes were deleted in 2009, 2011, and 2016.

“The NSA sincerely regrets its failure to prevent the deletion of this data,” NSA’s deputy director of capabilities, referenced as “Elizabeth B.,” said in a declaration filed in the fall. “NSA senior management is fully aware of this failure, and the Agency is committed to taking swift action to respond to the loss of this data.”

Another NSA official revealed on Thursday the data had been erased during a large effort to create more space for new information.

They sincerely regret it. Sure they do. Sure they do. These jokers have absolutely no credibility anymore. I’ve always known that the US government was as corrupt as the average banana republic, but they used to do a better job of hiding that fact.

That sounds convincing

The FBI resorts to an old police standby. “Gee, turns out that all the body cams and car cameras mysteriously failed simultaneously when our officers shot that unarmed little girl 37 times”:

The Justice Department has turned over to Congress additional text messages involving an FBI agent who was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team following the discovery of derogatory comments about President Donald Trump.

But the department also said in a letter to lawmakers that its record of messages sent to and from the agent, Peter Strzok, was incomplete because the FBI, for technical reasons, had been unable to preserve and retrieve about five months’ worth of communications.

New text messages highlighted in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray by Sen. Ron Johnson, the Republican chairman of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, are from the spring and summer of 2016 and involve discussion of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. They reference Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s decision to accept the FBI’s conclusion in that case and a draft statement that former FBI Director James Comey had prepared in anticipation of closing out the Clinton investigation without criminal charges.

The FBI declined to comment Sunday.

Strzok, a veteran counterintelligence agent who also worked the Clinton email case, was reassigned last summer from the team investigating ties between Russia and Trump’s Republican presidential campaign after Mueller learned he had exchanged politically charged text messages — many anti-Trump in nature — with an FBI lawyer also detailed to the group. The lawyer, Lisa Page, left Mueller’s team before the text messages were discovered.

The Justice Department last month produced for reporters and Congress hundreds of text messages that the two had traded before becoming part of the Mueller investigation. Many focused on their observations of the 2016 election and included discussions in often colorful language of their personal feelings about Trump, Clinton and other public figures. Some Republican lawmakers have contended the communication reveals the FBI and the Mueller team to be politically tainted and biased against Trump — assertions Wray has flatly rejected.

In addition to the communications already made public, the Justice Department on Friday provided Johnson’s committee with 384 pages of text messages, according to a letter from the Wisconsin lawmaker that was obtained by The Associated Press.

But, according to the letter, the FBI told the department that its system for retaining text messages sent and received on bureau phones had failed to preserve communications between Strzok and Page over a five-month period between Dec. 14, 2016, and May 17, 2017. May 17 was the date that Mueller was appointed as special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation.

The explanation for the gap was “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”

I think I’m going to have to remember that excuse. Why don’t you have any receipts for that deduction? Well, it was misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades. Hey, Windows 10, what are you going to do?

Release the memo!

More sound and fury signifying nothing? Or is the government shutdown, combined with what appears to be the imminent release of the FISA court abuse memo, the first thunderclap of the much-anticipated Storm?

All hell is breaking loose in Washington D.C. after a four-page memo detailing extensive FISA court abuse was made available to the entire House of Representatives Thursday. The contents of the memo are so explosive, says Journalist Sara Carter, that it could lead to the removal of senior officials in the FBI and the Department of Justice and the end of Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation.

These sources say the report is “explosive,” stating they would not be surprised if it leads to the end of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation into President Trump and his associates.

A source close to the matter tells Fox News that “the memo details the Intelligence Committee’s oversight work for the FBI and Justice, including the controversy over unmasking and FISA surveillance.” An educated guess by anyone who’s been paying attention for the last year leads to the obvious conclusion that the report reveals extensive abuse of power and highly illegal collusion between the Obama administration, the FBI, the DOJ and the Clinton Campaign against Donald Trump and his team during and after the 2016 presidential election.

Lawmakers who have seen the memo are calling for its immediate release, while the phrases “explosive,” “shocking,” “troubling,” and “alarming” have all been used in all sincerity. One congressman even likened the report’s details to KGB activity in Russia.

Now we know why the Democrats have been so stupidly intransigent in shutting down the government over a few illegal aliens. They’re just trying to shift the media narrative away from the expected fallout from the release of the memo.

It’s important to keep in mind that all of these things – all of them – are interconnected. It’s sometimes hard to remember that since the media covers every story as if it appeared ex nihilo even when the same people are involved from one story to the next, but there is absolutely no chance that the Democrats just happened to dig in their heels over nothing at this particular point in time.

After all, no one expected the Swamp not to resist its draining. And right now, the illegal collusion between the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign, the FBI, and the DOJ is its weakest and most vulnerable point.

They all knew

A woman’s expose of Brian Epstein in Vanity Fair was whitewashed back in 2003:

I got to work on all of it—and Epstein kept close tabs on me. He didn’t want to be seen to cooperate, but he’d do his best to control me. He phoned regularly. I wasn’t altogether surprised to be quickly summoned to the offices of the rich and powerful, sometimes before I’d even asked to meet with them.

James “Jimmy” Cayne, then the cigar-chomping CEO of Bear Stearns, not only phoned me up, he found the time in his busy day to give me a tour of the office. He was on his best behavior, talking up Epstein’s alleged supposed great brain, his value to the bank—never mind the fact that Epstein had had to leave it quickly in 1981; this Cayne put down to Epstein’s ambition “outgrowing” the place.

I also met with respected real estate developer Marshall Rose; the former Bear Stearns chairman Alan “Ace” Greenberg called me; so too did Leslie Wexner, the founder and CEO of The Limited, who trusted Epstein so much he had given Epstein carte blanche to insert himself into both Wexner’s family and business affairs, according to people who saw Epstein’s contract; they all chattered on about Epstein’s brilliantly creative mind, his intellectual prowess—a mental agility that, to put it bluntly, was simply not evident in the many phone conversations he had with me….

I worked through December 2002 like a dog. I worked with three fact-checkers, the magazine’s lawyer; I sifted through everything Epstein threw at me and defused it. We were getting ready to go to press. And then the bullet came. “Graydon’s taking out the women from the piece,” Doug Stumpf, my editor, told me.

I began to cry. It was so wrong. The family had been so brave. I thought about the mother, her fear of the dark, of the harm she feared might come to her daughters. And then I thought of all the rich, powerful men in suits ready to talk about Epstein’s “great mind.”

“Why?” I asked Graydon. “He’s sensitive about the young women” was his answer. “And we still get to run most of the piece.”

And then the guy got his wrist slapped four years later for multiple sex offenses that should have been enough to put him away for a long time.

The thing is, if a man has a brilliantly creative mind, an intelligent woman is not merely going to notice it, she’s going to be drawn to it. So, whatever it was that those very rich men saw in Epstein, I very much doubt that it was his intellect that made him so valuable to them.

Plague for profit

All right, so this Blind Item at Crazy Days and Nights sounds way too far-fetched to be true; it’s more akin to a SF-horror novel plot than actual news, right?

Apparently The Church is finding it more difficult to bring in children the way they have in the past. That elusive head of the Church has donated tens of millions of dollars to research against diseases, many of which adversely affect third world countries. It was during this process of trying to eradicate a disease that one of the scientists created a pathogen which can kill swiftly and effectively. When the head of The Church heard about it, he agreed to test it on a village in a country that was friendly to bribes. It worked really well. It killed an astonishing number of people which were mainly adults. The children of the adults were 30-40 miles distant at a boarding school. Now, with no parents, they needed to be adopted. The Church, along with more bribes to the government had a great way to get large numbers of children quickly.

With that success, they decided to try it again, but this time, the villagers didn’t stay in place as they had before and some traveled to a neighboring village. The next thing you know, it has now started spreading to different countries and killing people faster than they can create cover stories. Look for them to spread the rumor it is an Ebola outbreak to give themselves a chance to destroy the evidence of what they did.

It wouldn’t shock me if they come forward with a cure and make hundreds of millions of dollars. That might bring too much publicity for them though. Even they would have tough time watching thousands of people die though wouldn’t they?

I mean, lethal artificial diseases that are being tested in third world countries is just crazy conspiracy theory, right? Right?

Fears are growing of a major health crisis in East Africa as a girl died of a suspected fever which could be more deadly than the Black Death. A nine-year-old girl died in central Uganda with the symptoms of an eye-bleeding disease which it is thought could kill up to 40 per cent of those infected by it.

The feared outbreak comes only months after hundreds of people were killed by the plague in Madagascar in what was described as the worst bout for 50 years. The symptoms of the new disease include headaches, bleeding, vomiting, diarrhoea and muscle pains.

This timeline just keeps getting weirder. If the Vikings win the Super Bowl, we’ll know all bets are officially off and literally anything can happen.

Hollywood values: the dam cracks

Eliza Dushku accuses Joel Kramer of sexually assaulting her at the age of 12:

Eliza Dushku has accused stunt coordinator Joel Kramer of molesting her when she was 12 years old. Kramer has denied the allegations. Her account, posted early Saturday morning, comes in the wake of the continuing #metoo movement and the launch of the Time’s Up campaign to combat sexual harassment and assault.

In a Facebook post, Dushku wrote that she was assaulted while working with Kramer on the 1994 James Cameron film “True Lies.”  According to her post, Kramer molested her in a Miami hotel room, where he “laid me down on the bed, wrapped me with his gigantic writhing body, and rubbed all over me.” Kramer would have been 36 at the time.

Dushku alleges that he “methodically built my and my parents’ trust, for months grooming me,” and told her parent that he would take her for a swim in the hotel’s pool. Instead, her took her to his hotel room, where he “disappeared in the bathroom and emerged, naked, bearing nothing but a small hand towel held flimsy at his mid-section.”

Kramer told Variety Saturday morning that Dushku’s allegations were “absolutely not true.” According to Kramer, Dushku swam in the hotel pool with him and other members of the stunt crew, including Dushku’s stunt double. Afterwards, he took her to her first ever sushi meal, and then took her home.

Crazy Days and Nights has been hinting at this for a while. Reese Witherspoon has made similar allegations of an attack by a producer when she was underage, although she has not yet named the individual responsible. The Hollywood Values dam hasn’t crumbled yet, but the cracks are spreading.

I observe that Kramer’s suggestion that Dushku is making up the allegations because “she may have had a crush on him” is classic pedophile deflection. As I have personally witnessed in court, pedos frequently resort to the “she came on to me” defense.

Years ago, my friends and I nearly got kicked out of a courtroom when a clean-cut, harmless little defendant who looked like Michael J. Fox, right down to the feathered hair and the brown corduroy sports coat with leather elbow pads, was on the stand and was asked by the judge if he had any mitigating facts to offer for his behavior in what, as far as we understood, was a date rape case. (We were there for a traffic offense and had come in towards the end of the hearing.) The defendant pointed out that he had not been the aggressor, that the alleged victim had come on to him, and that in fact he had been asleep when she jumped into his bed and woke him up by tickling him.

To be honest, we felt that this was a pretty compelling defense until the judge said, “Mr. So-and-so, she was FIVE YEARS OLD!” This was so shocking and unexpected that we all burst out laughing, thereby causing the security guards to give us a stern warning. Needless to say, the “she came on to me” defense was not a success then, and I very much doubt it will be in Mr. Kramer’s case.

State employee screws up, Trump to blame

Americans are so not ready for actual war that involves them actually being attacked, as opposed to an accidental false warning. And remember, no matter who screws up, the God-Emperor is responsible.

Approx. 8.05am: A routine internal test during a shift change was initiated. This was a test that involved the Emergency Alert System, the Wireless Emergency Alert, but no warning sirens.

8.07am: A warning was erroneously triggered statewide by an employee at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA).

8.10am: State Adjutant Maj. Gen. Joe Logan validated with the US Pacific Command that there was no missile launch.

Honolulu Police Department notified of the false alarm by HI-EMA.

8.13am: State Warning Point issues a cancellation of the Civil Danger Warning Message. This would have prevented the initial alert from being rebroadcast to phones that may not have received it yet. For instance, if a phone was not on at 8.07am, it would not receive the alert later on.

8.20am: HI-EMA issues public notification of cancellation via their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

8.24am: Governor Ige retweets HI-EMA’s cancellation notice.

8.30am: Governor posts cancellation notification to his Facebook page.

8.45am: After getting authorization from FEMA Integral Public Alert and Warning System, HI-EMA issued a ‘Civil Emergency Message’ remotely, cancelling the false alert.

The Russians must be laughing so hard that vodka is coming out of their noses. So, this is what the great dumbing down looks like.

Allahpundit explains the two primary conspiracy theory explanations:

Minor: It was a hack but will be played off as an error by emergency warning services.
Major: There was a missile, we shot it down, and now it’s all being played off as a false alarm.

Given that the West Coast is clearly under the threat of imminent attack, I expect Michelle Malkin has already concluded that the only rational response is the immediate internment of all Koreans and Korean-Americans.