Nunes: Atkinson's testimony was "a joke"

Intelligence Community Inspector General, Michael Atkinson

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance quotes Devin Nunes.

On Sunday, October 6th, Ranking Member Devin Nunes also discussed his concerns with the testimony of Michael Atkinson. Nunes noted the testimony “was a joke”.

Nunes told Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Sunday host Matt Boyle, “[The ICIG is] either totally incompetent or part of the deep state, and he’s got a lot of questions he needs to answer because he knowingly changed the form and the requirements in order to make sure that this whistleblower complaint got out publicly.”

“So he’s either incompetent or in on it, and he’s going to have more to answer for, I can promise you, because we are not going to let him go; he is going to tell the truth about what happened,” Nunes added.

...Michael Atkinson was Senior Counsel for the DOJ-NSD, at the very epicenter of the political weaponization and FISA abuse.

Read more here.

Two people I trust

Do Democrats now have the upper hand with the President? Stephen Miller believes the Deep State is terrified of being exposed.

The insidious power of the unelected administrative state

In National Review, Victor Davis Hanson writes,

The insidious power of the unelected administrative state is easy to understand. After all, it governs the most powerful aspects of modern American life: taxes, surveillance, criminal-justice proceedings, national security, and regulation. The nightmares of any independent trucker or small-business person are being audited by the IRS, having communications surveilled, or being investigated by a government regulator or prosecutor.

...Lois Lerner, director of the Exempt Organizations division of the IRS, more or less got away with targeting mostly conservative groups before the 2012 election. She had ensured that dozens of nonprofits would not receive prompt tax-exempt status and ostensibly oppose Obama’s agendas. Eric Holder’s Justice Department surveilled various Associated Press reporters and especially Fox News’s James Rosen on the suspicion that they were receiving leaked information from Obama administration sources.

The so-called deep state is often weaponized to reflect current orthodoxies. In the past 30 years its operating premises have embraced multiculturalism, feminism, and identity-politics diversity — more or less the sacred tenets that Trump has targeted. Between 2009 and 2016 the Obama administration, to take one example, had recalibrated the war on terror and had hoped to change its reality through the use of state-sanctioned euphemisms. Obama sought to use the apparat to institutionalize the notion that radical Islam had no intrinsic connection with terrorism, and that adherents of Islam had no greater propensity to incite violence against Westerners than did followers of other religions — political correctness that Donald Trump campaigned against throughout 2016.

For which he’d never be forgiven.

Read more here.

What if?

In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson wrote on January 20 an imaginary scenario in which all of the things that the Deep State has done to President Trump would have been done to President Obama. Imagine here.

"the media are hopelessly biased, and there really is a “deep state” out to to overturn the 2016 election.'

Mollie Hemingway reports in the Federalist,

...Just last month, CNN reported that top FBI officials opened an investigation into Trump after the lawful firing of Comey because Trump “needed to be reined in,” a shocking admission of abuse of power by our nation’s top law enforcement agency.

...The latest Times report does provide more detail than these earlier reports, however, and none of it makes the FBI look good. In fact, it provides evidence of a usurpation of constitutional authority to determine foreign policy that belongs not with a politically unaccountable FBI but with the citizens’ elected president. More on that in a bit.

Criminalizing Foreign Policy Differences
...The Saturday New York Times article appeared on page one, above the fold, with the almost laughable headline “F.B.I. Investigated if Trump Worked for the Russians.” The online version of the story was headlined “F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia.” Nine paragraphs into the story, the reporters admit that there is and was literally “no evidence” to support the idea Trump worked for Russia.

The top of the article, however, immediately presented the FBI-friendly interpretation of the agency’s motivations as fact — without evidence and despite strong evidence to the contrary — saying the FBI began its investigation because they were “so concerned by the president’s behavior” rather than saying it was because they were “so concerned he’d continue to expose their behavior” or “so concerned he’d hold them accountable for their political investigations.”

The American people get to determine who sets foreign policy, and they do so through elections. The FBI does not get to set foreign policy by running criminal and counterintelligence investigations to punish those who step outside their preferred approach. They have no constitutional authority to do that.

...In sum, the framing of this New York Times article is either poorly conceived or outright disingenuous at every turn. Using the completely lawful and constitutional firing of the bumbling Comey as pretext for opening a criminal investigation into the president is a grand abuse of power by the FBI. Attempting to overtake the authority to determine U.S. foreign policy from the lawfully determined president of the United States is a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

For one of the nation’s largest newspapers to suggest that this makes the president — and not the FBI — look bad actually validates two of Trump’s biggest complaints: the media are hopelessly biased, and there really is a “deep state” out to to overturn the 2016 election.

Read more here.

"There are elephants crashing around in the forest!"

I apologize for linking to a story written in March, but it is one that I missed, and maybe you did, too. James Rosen writes in the Examiner,

...the academic scholarship published since 1977 has documented in exhaustive detail how the critical wings of the Nixon White House, the National Security Council, the covert operations unit dubbed “the Plumbers,” and Nixon’s campaign arm, the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, were all infiltrated by rival power centers in the capital and exploited for intelligence. The people burrowing in came from the military, the intelligence community, and the news media (reports that the Soviet Union also placed moles in the Nixon White House have not been confirmed).

Sen. Howard Baker, R-Tenn., the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate committee and later President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, never spoke explicitly of a Deep State. But he alluded to it once, in suitably cryptic terms. Reeling from his discovery that the Pentagon had spied on Nixon, and struggling to grasp the large role of the Central Intelligence Agency in Watergate, Baker said: “There are elephants crashing around in the forest.”

The instrument the military men used was the JCS-NSC liaison office, housed in the Executive Office Building and run by a pair of admirals. The late Melvin Laird, the longtime Wisconsin representative selected by Nixon to run the Pentagon, told me in a 1997 interview that before becoming defense secretary in January 1969, he had observed the chiefs building what was, in literal terms, a covert intelligence capability against the White House.

By December 1971, the White House Special Investigations Group, a covert unit called the "Plumbers" formed to plug leaks of classified material to the news media, had uncovered the activities of Navy Yeoman Charles Radford, a stenographer and courier detailed to the JCS-NSC liaison office. After intensive polygraph examination, Radford admitted to having stolen some 5,000 classified documents in 1970-71 from White House National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and his aides. He'd even rifled through Kissinger’s briefcase while he slept on his official airplane. Radford admitted having passed top-secret documents, via the liaison office, to Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Thomas Moorer.

...the CIA’s inspector general reported in 1975, after Nixon had resigned, that CIA agents had been placed in “intimate components of the Office of the President.”

...Why would these institutions have wanted to spy on Nixon? Mitchell had a theory. As he told Len Colodny, co-author of Silent Coup (1991): “It was his [Nixon’s] personality and his mode of operation that did him in.”

...In the political donations made by Mueller’s staff lawyers, federal filings show, more than $62,000 went to Democrats, only $2,750 to Republicans.

Nixon would have understood. Seven of the top eight lawyers on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force had served under Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department. In the early 2000s, again using FOIA, I became the first researcher to mine the WSPF's 10,000-page archive: 10,000 pages in all. And while those papers did not contain the kind of sophomoric invective for the incumbent that would later characterize the Strzok/Page texts, the WSPF archive captured the prejudicial bias the Watergate special prosecutors harbored toward their prey.

As Trump surveys the political landscape of 2018, he too can be forgiven for imagining that the Deep State, or something like it, exists. Like Richard Nixon, our 45th president took the oath of office keenly aware that influential figures in the military and intelligence communities deeply distrusted him as an accused colluder with a foreign power, as someone who was not “one of us,” and as a man many said was psychologically unfit for the presidency, whatever voters thought. Both saw their inaugurations marred by rioting. Both would stand eternally accused, whatever the evidence, of capturing the presidency through collusion with a foreign power, and thus be stripped, by media elites that despised them, of all legitimacy. And like Nixon, Trump has been subjected, from the inception of his presidency, to unprecedented leaks of classified material to those elites.

In all this, with the various Russia investigations still unresolved, their ultimate discoveries and outcomes unknown, Trump would do well to internalize the central lesson of Watergate, and perhaps thereby avoid some of the many self-inflicted wounds that Nixon committed during his own death throes against entrenched forces. This lesson Nixon articulated in the final minutes of his presidency, in the maudlin and meandering farewell address he delivered to the White House staff in the East Room on Aug. 9, 1974, shortly before boarding the helicopter that whisked him away from power.

“Always remember,” he said, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

Read more here.

Comey: "Don't look at my corruption. Look at what I want you to look at!"

Andrew's opening monolog is about James Comey, who, since being fired as head of the FBI, has been working full time as a "sanctimonious crap weasel." He testified behind closed doors in Congress Monday that he had no idea why he and everyone under his command had been either fired or demoted and that he was not aware that he had even been FBI Director until he read it in the newspaper like everybody else. Comey declared that every Republican must allow his or her reputation to be utterly destroyed in order to assure that Democrats win the next election. When asked why Republicans should do that, Comey answered, "Because otherwise, I will end up in jail where I belong! How dare they ask me about my actions (referring to Fox News, the only mainstream media outlet to ask questions about FBI corruption under Comey's lack of leadership.)

The Deep State is real. It is not a "conspiracy theory" to say that they acted against the candidacy, then the actual presidency of Donald Trump to preserve their own power. The New York Times has trotted out that phrase, just as the CIA did in the 1960s to cover up their involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald. Obama-appointed judges have said that Obama and his Deep State appointees decide what the law is. The Supreme Court needs to step forward and say the laws are what the legislators who made the laws say they are, as long as those laws are in accordance with the Constitution.

The state of our nation is that we have just a few elected officials representing us, while thousands of unelected people, protected by civil service rules so they won't get fired, come to believe that they can implement or not implement laws in any way they see fit. Democrats and the Left media are natural allies who influence and agree with the policies set by the unelected bureaucrats.

The puppy dog passivity the press brought forward in the Obama years has been followed by the ferocity they bring to Donald Trump. The problem is that the press treated Obama one way and Trump the opposite, just like Comey treated Hilary Clinton one way and Donald Trump an entirely different way. Comey is arrogant now because the Democrats are coming into power in the House in January and they will do everything in their power to protect him and cover up the Deep State crimes against Trump and his administration.

Apparently, Facebook has taken the Daily Wire podcasts off of Facebook!

Andrew's guest is Adam Plantinga, a veteran cop who has written books about police work and, after 17 years in law enforcement is still doing police work as a Sergeant in Los Angelos. His latest book is Police Craft. He says that in those 17 years he has only heard one officer say the "N" word. The crime rate is highest in lower socioeconomic neighborhoods which happen to have a majority of black and brown residents. Many are involved in the sale or use of street drugs. People grow up expecting to go to jail or having their friends go to jail. Also, We are not doing mentally ill persons any favors by giving freedom to people who cannot function in society. Cops need to have a long fuse in dealing with people that are irrational and/or strung out on dope.

In answer to a question by Andrew, Plantinga said he thought an HBO show called The Wire did the best job of accurately portraying the jobs of cops. Movies? Plantinga is still waiting for a movie to accurately portray police work. He says that the common use of body cameras is going a long way towards helping people understand how cops operate.

Miss Universe had a transgender guy who was Miss Spain. The media celebrated! Andrew asks, "Who is this good for? What does the Left want?"

The dangerous “deep state” of elite but unelected federal officials

At American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes,

If there is such a thing as a dangerous “deep state” of elite but unelected federal officials who feel that they are untouchable and unaccountable, then John Brennan is the poster boy.

VDH then gives a long list of examples of Brennan's dangerous actions.

Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice lied about the Benghazi tragedy, the nature of the Bowe Bergdahl/Guantanamo detainee exchange, the presence of chemical weapons in Syria, and her role in unmasking the identities of surveilled Americans.

Andrew McCabe, recently fired from his job as FBI deputy director, openly admitted to lying to investigators, claiming he was “confused and distracted.” McCabe had said that he was not a source for background leaks about the investigation of the Clinton Foundation. He wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post that “some of my answers were not fully accurate . . .”

Former FBI Director James Comey likely lied about not drafting a statement exonerating Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing in her email scandal before interviewing her.

Comey misled a FISA court by not providing the entire truth about the Steele dossier. He falsely assured the president that he was not under investigation while likely leaking to others that Trump was, in fact, under investigation.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee when he said that the National Security Agency did not collect data on American citizens. When caught in the lie, Clapper claimed that he had given the “least untruthful” answer to the committee that he could publicly provide.

In the past, Clapper had also misled the country about the “secular” nature of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the threat posed by the Islamic State.

Note that Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, and Rice so far have not been held to account for their distortions. We cynically expect our politicians and even presidents to fabricate, but we idealistically (and naively) assume that career government servants do not.

A common strategy of the deep state careerist is the psychological tactic known as “projection.” To square their own circles of lying, our so-called best and brightest loudly accuse others of precisely the sins that they themselves commit as a matter of habit.

In the ensuing chaos and uproar, careerists such as Brennan, Clapper, and Comey usually escape scrutiny—to proceed to their next political reincarnation, Beltway billet, book deal, or television gig.

Read more here.

THERE IS NO DEEP STATE!

Ace writes,

ANYONE CLAIMING THAT THERE IS A DEEP STATE
SHOULD IMMEDIATELY BE REPORTED TO THE DEEP STATE
FOR REEDUCATION ABOUT THE NON-EXISTENCE OF THE DEEP STATE

A MIND CLEAN OF THOUGHTS IS A MIND CLEAR OF CLUTTER.

BE WELL, CITIZEN, AND TAKE YOUR REQUIRED DOSES
OF WORK PILLS, SEX PILLS, SLEEP PILLS, AND CALM PILLS.

Read more here.

Two emerging heroes: Judge Napolitano, Admiral Rogers

At The Last Refuge Sundance educates us about some of the nefarious deeds of the Obama administration and its Deep State. Remember when Judge Napolitano said that Obama used the British spy agency to spy on Trump's team? Turns out Napolitano was accurate! I wonder how long it will take for Fox News to reinstate Napolitano, whose allegations got in the way of Rupert Murdoch's efforts to purchase Sky News. Sundance writes,

The British government and British intelligence community were furious at Napolitano and Fox News. At the time Rupert Murdoch was attempting to purchase SkyNews, which might have aided in the severity of his response to Napolitano.

“Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command. He didn’t use the NSA. He didn’t use the CIA. He didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use Department of Justice. He used GCHQ. What the heck is GCHQ? That’s the initials for the British spying agency. They have 24/7 access to the NSA database. So by simply having two people go to them saying, ‘President Obama needs transcripts of conversations involving candidate Trump, conversations involving president-elect Trump,’ he’s able to get it, and there are no American fingerprints on this.”

~ Judge Andrew Napolitano

Another hero in all of this is Mike Rogers, NSA Director. He did not go along with the other intelligence agencies who were collecting information on the Trump team.

Read the whole thing here.

Talking points

The Democrats are unified in sticking to their claims that the Russians influenced our election of Donald Trump, and the Republicans say that the Deep State feloniously unmasked American citizens and members of Trump's staff by leaking intelligence surveillance to people not authorized to have the information. Frankly, I have my doubts as to whether the Congressmen and women on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees have even read very much of the intel! Folks, we have no privacy!

Unmasking Deep Throat

At the American Thinker, James Lewis asks,

Was Watergate a black op, too?

...Item 1.

Deep Throat was unmasked to the public when he died about ten years ago, and he turned out to be one Mark Felt, Jr., J. Edgar Hoover's associate director of the FBI.

Felt was passed over for promotion to director of the FBI by President Nixon.

By the exalted moral standards of Washington, D.C., Mark Felt had plenty of reason to want to destroy President Nixon.

It was Mark Felt who met with Woodward and Bernstein to administer one dose of deadly poison after another to President Nixon, until Nixon was abandoned by the Republican Party and resigned from the office of president of the United States.

Woodward and Bernstein received undying fame for their intrepid shoe-leather reporting, but it was Mark Felt who mixed every dose of poison they bylined.

Item 2.

The editor-in-chief at the Washington Post during Watergate was Ben Bradlee, former CIA spook, with his own long list of reasons to hate Richard Nixon.

Felt and Bradlee were both "old Washington hands," as they called themselves, both members of the D.C. Leftist Establishment from the Stalin years on. They had years of experience running black ops against America's friends and foes. They knew exactly how it's done.

Woodward and Bernstein fronted for former spooks Bradlee and Felt, old comrades-in-arms, you might say.

The media might try to tell you they eventually told the truth, after Felt and Bradlee were good and dead.

The media have no shame, and only Twitter can contradict them today.

So you can believe our self-hyping media about Watergate. Or you can choose to think Watergate turned the whole Fakestream into a raging lynch mob, because Nixon had publicly exposed Eastern Establishment Stalinists in D.C. during the Truman years.

Read more here.

Thanks to Sundance at The Last Refuge for guiding us to an understanding of what is going on in the Deep State

Here is an update from Sundance at The Last Refuge on the overview of intelligence. Sundance believes there is in Washington a UniParty consisting of PR functionaries (Congress and Senate) who dance to the tune of the lobbyists and billionaires who fund their campaigns. He writes this afternoon,

♦ Obviously Chairman Devin Nunes has placed himself outside the rails of Deep State. ♦ The UniParty now wants him removed. ♦ Nunes has become a risk. ♦ Brutally obvious questions being ignored by media become focus of wider electorate.

Chairman Nunes is the only member of the Intelligence Oversight Gang-of-Eight who has reviewed the executive level intelligence product which caused him concern. Nunes alleged in the last week he received evidence that Obama administration political figures gained access to unmasked American identities through foreign intercepts involving the Trump transition team between November 2016 and January 2017.

Media and congressional leadership intentionally skip the obvious questions:

♦ Why don’t the other seven members also go look at the same executive intel?

• Why, instead of looking at the same data, does the entire UniParty political apparatus and DC media now seem intent on eliminating Devin Nunes?

• Why doesn’t Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer or Mark Warner simply go look at the same executive intelligence product?

• Why doesn’t Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell or Richard Burr simply go look at the same executive intelligence product?

• Why doesn’t any member of the DC media ask such brutally obvious questions?

• Why is the DC UniParty both intent on not looking at the intelligence and simultaneously intent on removing Nunes, and getting the investigation removed from the House Intelligence Committee (Nunes/Schiff) and over to the Senate Intelligence Committee (Burr/Warner)?

• What is it about that Executive Office Level Intelligence Product the gang-of-eight are all so desperately afraid of?

• Why would the Senate launch another entire congressional intelligence inquiry, when the head of the Senate Intelligence Committees, Burr and Warner, are desperate NOT to see the intelligence product that causes Nunes such concern?

• What does that say about the intent of a committee when they refuse to even look at the intelligence reports they are supposed to be investigating?

These are all simple questions that hang above the political chaff and countermeasures.

These are also simply questions that explain why President Trump made this simple request:



Notice how in the three months since that request was made by President-Elect Donald Trump, only one member of congress has actually done what was requested. That member is Devin Nunes.

Now look at what’s happening around Devin Nunes.

The brutally obvious reality behind these simple questions highlights something much more than the simple SWAMP. The reactive behavior is not confined to current DC politicians or the media surrounding DC.

What we see now, is a response by multiple elements more aptly called “Deep State“.

Carly Fiorina, a former member of the CIA advisory board, calling for an independent commission seems rather odd when you accept the reality that current congressional oversight officials are refusing to even look at the current intelligence.

Odd, that is, until you realize such a request is a way for a Deeper State to protect itself.

Devin Nunes is the only official who has viewed the intelligence, therefore Devin Nunes is now a risk – he must be removed. Similarly, the committee which Devin Nunes chairs is also a risk; because if Nunes is successful his committee will not be able to look away from the intelligence product(s) he puts in front of them.

Effective this week, the UniParty has deployed Senator Richard Burr and Senator Mark Warner as countermeasures.

Read more here.

"Deep State" sounds way too cool for what these people are doing. They're basically just jerks!"

Also, how about a "Sanctuary Judge" who enables a DUI criminal escape and evade ICE agents through her private exit in the courthouse!

"The chickens have come home to roost!"

Judge Andrew Napolitano writes,

...The chickens have come home to roost. In our misguided efforts to keep the country safe, we have neglected to keep it free. We have enabled a deep state to become powerful enough to control a powerful president. We have placed so much data and so much power in the hands of unelected, unaccountable, opaque spies that they can use it as they see fit -- even to the point of committing federal felonies. Now some have boasted that they can manipulate and thus control the president of the United States by selectively revealing and concealing what they know about anyone, including the president himself.

This is a perilous state of affairs, brought about by the maniacal passion for surveillance spawned under George W. Bush and perfected under Barack Obama -- all with utter indifference to the widespread constitutional violations and permanent destruction of personal liberties. This is not the government the Framers gave us. But it is one far more dangerous to human freedom than the one from which they seceded in 1776.

Read more here.

"Who rules the United States? The simple and terrible answer is we do not know. But we are about to find out."

Matthew Continetti writes at The Free Beacon,

By any historical and constitutional standard, "the people" elected Donald Trump and endorsed his program of nation-state populist reform. Yet over the last few weeks America has been in the throes of an unprecedented revolt. Not of the people against the government—that happened last year—but of the government against the people. What this says about the state of American democracy, and what it portends for the future, is incredibly disturbing.

There is, of course, the case of Michael Flynn. He made a lot of enemies inside the government during his career, suffice it to say. And when he exposed himself as vulnerable those enemies pounced. But consider the means: anonymous and possibly illegal leaks of private conversations. Yes, the conversation in question was with a foreign national. And no one doubts we spy on ambassadors. But we aren't supposed to spy on Americans without probable cause. And we most certainly are not supposed to disclose the results of our spying in the pages of the Washington Post because it suits a partisan or personal agenda.

...The last few weeks have confirmed that there are two systems of government in the United States. The first is the system of government outlined in the U.S. Constitution—its checks, its balances, its dispersion of power, its protection of individual rights. Donald Trump was elected to serve four years as the chief executive of this system. Whether you like it or not.

The second system is comprised of those elements not expressly addressed by the Founders. This is the permanent government, the so-called administrative state of bureaucracies, agencies, quasi-public organizations, and regulatory bodies and commissions, of rule-writers and the byzantine network of administrative law courts. This is the government of unelected judges with lifetime appointments who, far from comprising the "least dangerous branch," now presume to think they know more about America's national security interests than the man elected as commander in chief.

Donald Trump did not cause the divergence between government of, by, and for the people and government, of, by, and for the residents of Cleveland Park and Arlington and Montgomery and Fairfax counties. But he did exacerbate it. He forced the winners of the global economy and the members of the D.C. establishment to reckon with the fact that they are resented, envied, opposed, and despised by about half the country. But this recognition did not humble the entrenched incumbents of the administrative state. It radicalized them to the point where they are readily accepting, even cheering on, the existence of a "deep state" beyond the control of the people and elected officials.

Who rules the United States? The simple and terrible answer is we do not know. But we are about to find out.

Read more here.

"The intelligence community is making every effort to upend this new president!"

Sabotage, Deep State: "A game is being played with the security of our country!" "The White House is under attack from elements inside the intelligence community which are trying to elevate tensions between Russia and the United States, and at the bottom of that is money...somebody trying to cash in."