Conservative Blogger
Friday, January 26, 2018
FBI officials worried about being too tough on Hillary Clinton during email investigation, texts show
FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were
concerned about being too tough on Democratic presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton during the bureau’s investigation into her email
practices because she might hold it against them as president, text
messages released on Thursday indicated.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman
Chuck Grassley released new messages between bureau officials Page and
Strzok, who were having an affair and exchanged more than 50,000 texts with each other during the election.
“One more thing: she might be our next president,” Page
texted Strzok on Feb. 25, 2016, in the midst of the presidential
campaign, in reference to Clinton.
Strzok replied that he “agreed” and he had relayed their discussion with someone named “Bill.”
Strzok not only worked on the Clinton case, but was assigned to the special counsel’s probe into Russia and the Trump campaign after a number of anti-Trump texts were discovered on his phone. Page also briefly worked on the special counsel investigation.
DOJ RECOVERS MISSING TEXT MESSAGES BETWEEN ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENTS STRZOK AND PAGE
Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said Thursday in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray that the exchange, among others, concerned him.
“The text messages that were provided raise serious concerns about the impartiality of senior leadership running both the Clinton and Trump investigations,” Grassley said.
“It's clear that [Strzok and Page] did not want her charged,” Rep. Trey Gowdy, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” He added, “They wanted her to be the president of the United States.”
Republicans, arguing some top officials at the FBI are politically biased against Trump, have seized on the texts, including one where Strzok and Page spoke of a “secret society” within the Department of Justice and the FBI and Strzok spoke of an “insurance policy” against a Trump win.
“The fix was in even before they interviewed the target of the investigation,” Gowdy, R-S.C., said.
New texts released by Grassley on Thursday also indicated that FBI officials believed FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe should be recused from the Clinton investigation because of his family’s ties to Virginia Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who is close with the Clintons.
In an October 28, 2016 text exchange, Page told Strzok that then- FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki thought McCabe should not have participated in the probe.
“Rybicki just called to check in,” she wrote. “He very clearly 100% believes that Andy should be recused because of the ‘perception.’”
“God,” Strzok replied.
McCabe eventually recused himself from the Clinton probe one week before the election.
“If McCabe eventually recused himself one week before the election, why did he not do so sooner?” Grassley asked Wray in the letter.
Grassley also told Wray he was concerned that Page and Strzok were transmitting government records on personal systems inappropriately. In a June 2017 message, Strzok wrote of typing a document on a “home computer.”
The senator said Page and Strzok also referenced other conversations “via iMessage, presumably on their personal Apple devices.”
“It appears that Strzok and Page transmitted federal records pertaining to the Clinton investigation on private, non-government services,” Grassley said. “It is important to determine whether their own similar conduct was a factor in not focusing on and developing evidence of similar violations by Secretary Clinton and her aides.”
The new messages surfaced the same day the Justice Department’s inspector general said he recovered a number of missing text messages between Strzok and Page.
Fox News has learned from U.S. government officials that the inspector general recovered the texts by taking possession of "at least four" phones belonging to Strzok and Page.
Congressional Black Caucus tried to bury 2005 Obama-Farrakhan photo, photographer says
 |
Obama with Farrakhan in 2005: The hidden pic |
Photojournalist Askia Muhammad released a photo
this week showing former President Barack Obama and the controversial
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan from Obama's years as a state
senator -- and the photographer revealed Thursday that the Congressional
Black Caucus had pressured him for more than a decade to keep it
hidden.
Muhammad told the Trice Edney News
Wire last week that he believed that the image “absolutely would have
made a difference” in the 2008 presidential campaign had it been made
public.
The image taken in 2005 at a Congressional Black Caucus
meeting on Capitol Hill showed then-Senator Obama, a young Democrat
from Illinois, smiling side-by-side with Farrakhan.Muhammad told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that the same day he snapped the photo, the CBC contacted him.
“A staff member from the black caucus called me and said ‘we have to have the picture back,’ and I was kind of taken aback. And we talked a couple of times on the phone after that, and I said ‘Okay, I will give the picture back to Minister Farrakhan’s chief of staff,’” he said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
He added that after he gave the original copy to Farrakhan’s staff, he kept his own copy but remained quiet.
“I gave the original disk to him and in a sense swore myself to secrecy because I had quietly made a copy for myself,” Muhammad said. “It’s my picture, it’s my art, and it’s my intellectual property. I owned it and I wanted to keep it.”
He said the CBC called him while he was still on Capitol Hill and he believed that it was because “they sensed the future.”
“Minister Farrakhan and his reputation would hurt someone trying to win acceptance in the broad cross-section,” he said, referring to the possibility at the time that the young senator was being considered for a presidential run.
Muhammad also said that Obama had, at some point, people from the Nation of Islam working on his staff and in his offices.
“In fact he had people from the Nation of Islam working on his staff and in his office in the Chicago, his Senate staff. The members of the Nation of Islam helped him in his Senate campaign and on the South Side of Chicago.”
The Congressional Black Caucus did not immediately reply to Fox News’ request for a comment.
Trump apologizes for Britain First retweets in interview, host says
 | |
| President Trump attends a dinner with business leaders and heads of state during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. (Reuters) |
President Donald Trump apologized for retweeting content from a far-right group called Britain First, according to Piers Morgan.
Morgan, the former CNN talk show host
who conducted the interview for the U.K. television channel ITV, posted
a photo Friday of their meeting in Davos, Switzerland, and said Trump
claimed he did not know about Britain First.
“I don’t want to be involved with these people,” Trump
told Morgan, according to the host’s tweet. “If you’re telling me
they’re horrible racist people. I certainly apologize.”The furor erupted after Trump, who has almost 48 million Twitter followers, in November retweeted three anti-Muslim videos posted by a leader of Britain First. The tiny group regularly posts inflammatory videos purporting to show Muslims engaged in acts of violence, but without providing context or supporting information.
British Prime Minister Theresa May and Trump traded criticism at the time over the retweets and British lawmakers labeled the U.S. leader a hate peddler.
Trump told Morgan that he is “often the least racist person that anybody is going to meet. Certainly I wasn’t endorsing anybody.”
The full interview with Trump is scheduled to air Sunday on ITV.
Trump was talked out of firing Mueller last June, source says
President Trump told top officials this past June
that he wanted to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, but was talked
out of doing so by White House counsel Don McGahn and other aides, a
source close to the White House told Fox News late Thursday.
The source could neither confirm nor deny a New York Times report :-) that Trump ordered Mueller's dismissal, but backed down when McGahn threatened to resign instead.
However, the source added that then-White House chief
of staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Steven Bannon believed last
summer that Trump would fire Mueller and were very worried about the
political fallout.TRUMP OPEN TO TALKING TO MUELLER
"They said, 'This is going to blow up,'" the source recounted to Fox.
White House lawyer Ty Cobb declined to comment on either the source's account or the New York Times report "out of respect for the Office of the Special Counsel and its process."
According to the Times report, which cited "four people told of the matter," Trump claimed that Mueller had three conflicts of interest that disqualified him from overseeing the investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
Those conflicts included the fact that Mueller had been interviewed to replace the fired James Comey as FBI Director the day before he was appointed special counsel in May. Another alleged conflict Trump cited was that Mueller had once resigned his membership at Trump National Golf Club in northern Virginia in a dispute over fees.
The Times also reported that McGahn told White House officials that Trump would not carry out Mueller's firing on his own.
The Times also reported that Trump considered firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and elevating Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand to oversee Mueller's investigation. The report did not say what Trump's rationale for dismissing Rosenstein would be.
TRUMP SETS RED LINE FOR MUELLER ON RUSSIA PROBE, WARNS HE'LL EXPOSE 'CONFLICTS'
The response from Democrats was nearly immediate. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that if the report in The Times is true, Trump has crossed a "red line."
"Any attempt to remove the Special Counsel, pardon key witnesses or otherwise interfere in the investigation would be a gross abuse of power, and all members of Congress, from both parties, have a responsibility to our Constitution and to our country to make that clear immediately," Warner said.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation in early March after acknowledging that he had two previously undisclosed encounters with the Russian ambassador during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
On Wednesday, Trump told reporters that "I'd love to" talk to Mueller as part of the investigation, subject to his lawyers' approval. The president has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and told reporters that there was "no collusion whatsoever" and "no obstruction whatsoever."
In a July interview with The New York Times, Trump warned Mueller against expanding the special counsel investigation to his family's financial affairs.
"I think that's a violation. Look, this is about Russia," said Trump, who added that Mueller had "many other conflicts" in addition to his interview to run the FBI.
Fox News' Samuel Chamberlain contributed to this report, along with The Associated Press.
Ed Henry currently serves as FOX News Channel’s (FNC) chief national correspondent. He joined the network in June 2011.
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Hannity: DOJ has started recovering missing FBI texts, DOJ sources say
Fox News’ Sean Hannity said Wednesday night on
“Hannity” that the Justice Department has started recovering some of the
missing texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, citing
DOJ sources.
Federal law enforcement officials had
notified congressional committees that a technical glitch affected
thousands of FBI cellphones between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017. This
meant that 5 months’ worth of texts would be missing from Strzok and
Page, both of whom are under scrutiny after it was revealed that the
former members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team exchanged
anti-Trump texts during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Hannity said sources at the DOJ told him they have
begun to recover some of the texts from that time period. Specific
content from those texts has not been released.The missing messages have caused problems for the Justice Department inspector general's office.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have sent a letter to Inspector General Michael Horowitz noting that the IG's office said on Dec. 13 that it had all the messages between Strzok and Page between Nov. 30, 2016, and July 28, 2017.
Lawmakers later learned of the five-month gap.
The lawmakers said they wanted the IG's office to "reconcile" those two points.
The five-month stretch of missing messages covers a period of time that includes President Donald Trump's inauguration, the firings of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and FBI Director James Comey and the standing-up of former FBI Director Mueller as special counsel to investigate alleged Trump campaign collusion with Russian officials during the 2016 election.
North Korea proudly displays captured USS Pueblo as war trophy
A North Korean military guard keeps watch over the USS Pueblo in Pyongyang, North Korea.
(Associated Press)
This week marks the 50th anniversary
of when the USS Pueblo was captured by North Korea -- and the Hermit
Kingdom is seizing on the opportunity to aggrandize the U.S. Navy ship’s
capture as a trophy against Washington amid escalating tensions.
The ship has become a spectacle in
the frozen Pothong River on the outskirts of the "Victorious Fatherland
Liberation War Museum" complex in central Pyongyang, where thousands of
North Koreans learn their country’s version of how, despite the odds, it
was able to defeat the Americans in the Korean War.
The USS Pueblo is the only U.S. ship held captive by a
foreign government, and is still officially in commission in the U.S.
Naval Vessel Register.Playing up the capture
North Korea’s state-run media is playing up the capture as it claims the U.S. is trying to disrupt North-South relations heading into next month’s Winter Olympics in South Korea.
On Jan. 23, 1968, the USS Pueblo tried to evade a North Korean submarine chaser, but was eventually captured as another submarine chaser, four torpedo boats and two MiG-21 fighter jets joined the scene.
One crewmember lost his life in the pursuit as the ship was peppered with gunfire and boarded -- an event that Americans insist took place in international waters. The 82 surviving sailors were taken prisoner and held captive in two different camps for 335 days.
North Korea claims the ship entered its territorial waters when it was attacked.
The incident came at the height of the Cold War, and set the stage for a potential serious military conflict. However, it drew to a close Dec. 21, 1968, when Maj. Gen. Gilbert H. Woodward, the chief U.S. negotiator, signed a statement acknowledging that the Pueblo had "illegally intruded into the territorial waters of North Korea" – although he disavowed that before and after.
Many of the men were crippled, malnourished and almost blind from the treatment they received during their capture.
'Hell Week'
They endured the worst of the treatment during a time the crew refers to as “Hell Week,” in which the North Koreans discovered the crew had discreetly given “the finger” in a series of staged propaganda photos. Initially, the crew said it was a “Hawaiian good luck sign."
To commemorate the anniversary, North Korea’s official news agency quoted a naval officer as saying the ship serves as a reminder for the U.S. that it will undergo a “crushing defeat” if it threatens the country’s independence. It also said a student visiting the ship felt the "pleasant sensation of a victor" as he looked at photos of the American crew.
The story of the USS Pueblo went largely underreported, which has been difficult for some crewmembers to accept.
“There are a lot of people who have no idea of what we went through,” Don Peppard, an administrative assistant on the Pueblo and president of the ship’s veterans association, told Fox News. “I think we’re lost to history.”
The U.S. government didn’t recognize the crew’s sacrifice until 1989, and awarded them Prisoner of War medals.
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