https://youtu.be/5jrXInh-1e4
Rep. Nunes on Mueller team wiping phones in the face of DOJ investigation
Sep 14, 2020
MBart mentions biden 'who obviously has his own issues' stepping down and camela as president
(at very end of video)
'Infiltration not invasion.'
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-usa-order/exclusive-obama-authorizes-secret-help-for-libya-rebels-idUSTRE72T6H220110330
3/30/2011
3/30/2011
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing covert U.S. government support for rebel forces seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, government officials told Reuters on Wednesday.
Obama signed the order, known as a presidential “finding”, within the last two or three weeks, according to government sources familiar with the matter.
Such findings are a principal form of presidential directive used to authorize secret operations by the Central Intelligence Agency. This is a necessary legal step before such action can take place but does not mean that it will.
As is common practice for this and all administrations, I am not going to comment on intelligence matters,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement. “I will reiterate what the president said yesterday – no decision has been made about providing arms to the opposition or to any group in Libya.”
The CIA declined comment.
News that Obama had given the authorization surfaced as the President and other U.S. and allied officials spoke openly about the possibility of sending arms supplies to Gaddafi’s opponents, who are fighting better-equipped government forces.
The United States is part of a coalition, with NATO members and some Arab states, which is conducting air strikes on Libyan government forces under a U.N. mandate aimed at protecting civilians opposing Gaddafi.
Interviews by U.S. networks on Tuesday, Obama said the objective was for Gaddafi to “ultimately step down” from power. He spoke of applying “steady pressure, not only militarily but also through these other means” to force Gaddafi out.
Obama said the U.S. had not ruled out providing military hardware to rebels. “It’s fair to say that if we wanted to get weapons into Libya, we probably could. We’re looking at all our options at this point,” he told ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer.
In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted to reporters that no decision had yet been taken.
U.S. officials monitoring events in Libya say neither Gaddafi’s forces nor the rebels, who have asked the West for heavy weapons, now appear able to make decisive gains. ..
always a trap when they say 'investment' seems like
https://nypost.com/2021/05/31/hunter-bidens-laptop-keeps-damning-joe-but-most-media-just-ignore-it/
..
Burisma was then paying Hunter (who had zero energy expertise) $83,333 a month to sit on its board. Another e-mail from the laptop reveals that Burisma cut Hunter’s pay in half in March 2017 — right after Joe became a private citizen, another clear sign of what actually qualified the Biden scion for such vast payouts.
Face time with a vice president, and the ability to brag about what you talked about over dinner, is worth a lot to global sleazoids. So are smiling photos that imply a relationship and pull at the highest reaches of US government.
Another sign of Joe’s collusion in Hunter’s unseemly work: The then-veep hired an aide away from one his son’s firms in 2014, and she then proceeded to keep her old bosses informed on visiting dignitaries and official events that might interest them.
Oh, and the Bidens have never themselves denied the laptop was Hunter’s before he abandoned it, nor denied the accuracy of its contents. The president and his camp have simply offered vague assurances that Joe Biden himself never did anything wrong.
Without doubt, if Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner or so on had been caught playing such games, it’d get nonstop coverage on MSNBC, and The Washington Post and The New York Times would have full investigative teams following up for months.
Hunter’s merchandizing of his last name wasn’t even anything new: The Biden family has been trading on Joe Biden’s high offices for decades, making millions off their presumed influence and access. Yet somehow news about it all is never “fit to print,” even though “democracy dies in darkness.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/kevin-clinesmith-doj-sentencing/617350/
12/10/2020 updated
Next month—as we wait to see who else will receive a pardon from President Donald Trump on his way out of office—a criminal prosecution that has proceeded with relatively little public attention will reach its conclusion.* U.S. District Judge James Boasberg will preside at a sentencing hearing to determine whether Kevin Clinesmith, a former FBI lawyer, will go to prison following his guilty plea earlier this year to one count of making false statements. Clinesmith might have deliberately misled a colleague, but he has already incurred consequences that are proportionate to his offense, and prison time would be more than he deserves.
Clinesmith’s lawyers have asked that he receive probation—his career has already been ruined, and he might never work as a lawyer again—while the government has asked that he be sentenced to somewhere between three and six months. Ordinarily, Clinesmith’s odds of receiving probation would be pretty good, but his case is politically fraught, which complicates matters considerably. The case is the first (and possibly last) criminal case to emerge from the investigation of the Trump-Russia probe that Attorney General Bill Barr tasked to U.S. Attorney John Durham. It is a case that almost certainly would not have been brought in a different administration.
Seen correctly, however, that political context is precisely why the government’s position is so misguided. In a way, the Clinesmith case is a tidy companion, both factually and conceptually, to Michael Flynn’s prosecution. Both men were accused of making false statements to the government, and the key argument that Flynn’s supporters have advanced—one the Justice Department itself advanced when it sought to dismiss the Flynn case—applies far more persuasively to Clinesmith: The law requires that misstatements to the government be “material” to constitute a crime. The decidedly generous view on that issue adopted by the Justice Department in the Flynn case would excuse Clinesmith just as easily as the department hoped it would excuse Flynn.
David Frum: Trump pardoned Flynn to save himself
The government’s position in the Flynn case appears to have been reverse engineered to get Flynn off the hook, but the law requires some consistency. Indeed, the statutory sentencing guidelines instruct the court to account for “the need to avoid unwarranted sentence disparities among defendants with similar records who have been found guilty of similar conduct,” yet the government’s sentencing submission in Clinesmith’s case entirely ignores this. Indeed, it makes no mention of the Flynn case at all—much less the fact that the government undertook an unprecedented effort to excuse Flynn’s conduct, or that he has now been pardoned by Trump.
Until earlier this year, I was a prosecutor at the Justice Department who specialized in financial fraud, so I know firsthand that the government does not criminally charge every false statement it identifies. The context of a misstatement matters. I also had my own troubling and far more modest experience with the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office—which first identified Clinesmith’s misconduct—when it investigated an allegation that I had improperly disclosed “sensitive” information to the media while working at the department. (I’ve previously written about the whole sordid affair.)
The relevant facts in the Clinesmith case concern his work as one of the people who prepared the applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveil Carter Page in 2016 and 2017, but if you cut through all the clutter, they are not terribly complicated. At the time, the FBI believed that Page may have worked with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf. By the spring of 2017, Page was claiming in media appearances that he had, in fact, previously worked with the FBI and CIA. As a result, for the fourth (and final) application to the FISC, the FBI case agent serving as the affiant—the person who would submit an affidavit attesting to the accuracy of the relevant facts in the government’s application to the court for the warrant—requested that Clinesmith ask the CIA whether Page had in fact been a “source” for the agency.
After corresponding with someone at the CIA on the question, Clinesmith told the FBI agent that Page had been a “subsource” (not a source). In the language of the FBI, a source has a direct relationship with a government agency and can be directly tasked with gathering information, while a subsource has a relationship with a source (not the agency itself) and cannot be tasked by the agency. The FBI agent asked Clinesmith whether he had received that information in writing from the CIA, and Clinesmith told him that he had. ..