Durham interviewing former NSA leader who alerted court of other FISA abuses

The former director of the National Security Agency is the latest to sit down with U.S. Attorney John Durham in the widening inquiry into the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation. Adm. Mike Rogers, who retired in 2018 after four years as NSA chief and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, has met with Durham, who is working at the behest of Attorney General William Barr, multiple times and is cooperating voluntarily in Durham's deep dive into the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation related to the Trump campaign and the Russian government, according to the Intercept. Rogers is likely being talked to because of his key intelligence perch, experiences uncovering Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act violations, and his role in the intelligence community's assessment of Russian interference.

The December report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz on FISA abuses by the DOJ and the FBI criticized the bureau’s reliance on British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s unverified dossier in pursuing electronic surveillance against Trump campaign associate Carter Page. In 2016, Rogers helped expose FISA flaws of a different kind by the NSA and the FBI. That October, as the bureau received its first Page surveillance warrant, Rogers notified the FISA Court of an NSA inspector general report that found the agency was pulling data directly from the internet and improperly searching it for information related to Americans in violation of FISA laws dealing with foreigners outside the United States targeted by U.S. intelligence agencies.

A FISA Court ruling from April 2017 revealed the high volume of violations, and that month the NSA announced it ended all searches where the foreign intelligence target was neither the sender nor receiver of a communication but was mentioned within it. "That in doing this we were going to lose some intelligence value, but my concern was I just felt it was important — we needed to be able to show that we are fully compliant with the law," Rogers told the Senate in 2017. The same FISA Court ruling stated that, by early 2016, the DOJ learned the FBI gave contractors access to massive amounts of FISA information well beyond what was necessary to respond to FBI requests. Another recently declassified October 2018 FISA Court ruling stemming from the court's inquiry into these FISA abuses found the bureau violated constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Horowitz's report also detailed how Rogers and the NSA viewed Steele's dossier with skepticism, pushing back against efforts by then-FBI Director James Comey and then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to include information from it in the high-profile January 2017 assessment on Russian election interference put together by the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA.

Rogers and Comey, along with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan, who is being scrutinized by Durham, briefed President-elect Trump about their findings at Trump Tower. Comey stayed to tell Trump about some of the dossier's more salacious allegations. The assessment concluded with "high confidence" that Russian President Vladimir Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016” and that Russia worked to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” and “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” The NSA diverged on one aspect, expressing only “moderate confidence” that Putin actively tried to help Trump’s election chances and harm those of Clinton by contrasting her unfavorably, and Durham is likely looking into whether Steele's dossier played a role in the determinations of the other agencies.

“I wouldn’t call it a discrepancy, I’d call it an honest difference of opinion between three different organizations and, in the end, I made that call,” Rogers told the Senate in May 2017. “It didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources.” Rogers was a Russia hawk, however, telling the Senate in February 2018 about Russia’s plans of “stirring discord in the West” and how “this threatens the foundations of democracy.” “More broadly, my concern is that President Putin has clearly come to the conclusion that there’s little price to pay here," Rogers said. "Clearly, what we have done is not enough.” “I was glad to see the broad direction that we were moving in," Rogers said in a post-retirement interview last year. "But I'm not going to pretend for a minute it's perfect by any stretch of the imagination.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/john-durham-interviewing-former-nsa-leader-who-told-court-about-other-fisa-abuses

John Solomon: Keep and Eye on McCabe and Comey – Their Testimony Is Being Looked at Closely

Solomon says DOJ Andrew McCabe and James Comey were at the head of the deep state machine and it’s time for Durham and Barr to meet out some discipline against those two partisan operatives. McCabe was caught lying under oath a number of times already.

Solomon also told Gregg Jarrett the McCabe and Comey are being looked at by Bill Barr and John Durham. John Solomon: "I don’t think McCabe and Comey’s stories add up now to the evidence now that has been put into the record by Horowitz. I would keep and eye on it. I think they’re two guys whose testimony is being looked at closely."

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/12/john-solomon-keep-and-eye-on-mccabe-and-comey-their-testimony-is-being-looked-at-closely-video/

>>7630223

Official Versions

Death

Or

Glory

Or

Depend

On

God

Or could also be:

Death

Or

Gitmo

https://www.abbreviations.com/DOG

Plane crashes in Kazakhstan shortly after takeoff, at least 14 dead

ALMATY (Reuters) - A Bek Air plane with 93 passengers and five crew members on board crashed near the city of Almaty in Kazakhstan on Friday shortly after taking off, killing at least 14 people, authorities in the Central Asian country said. The Fokker 100 aircraft, heading for the capital, Nur-Sultan, on a pre-dawn flight, “lost altitude during takeoff and broke through a concrete fence” before hitting a two-storey building, Kazakhstan’s Civil Aviation Committee said in a statement. A survivor told News website Tengrinews she heard a “terrifying sound” before the plane started losing altitude. “The plane was flying with a tilt. Everything was like in a movie: screaming, shouting, people crying,” she said.

At least 14 people were killed, and 22 have been hospitalized in grave condition, the Almaty mayor’s office said. A Reuters reporter traveling to the airport soon after the crash said there was thick fog in the area. The crash site in Almerek village - just beyond the end of the runway - has been cordoned off. A Reuters reporter saw the plane torn into two parts next to a house half-demolished by the impact.

Kazakh carrier Bek Air, which operates a fleet of Fokker 100 jets, could not be immediately reached for comment. Authorities have not suggested any possible cause of the accident. The aviation committee said it was suspending all flights of that type of aircraft pending an investigation. “Those responsible will face tough punishment in accordance with the law,” Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev tweeted, expressing condolences to the victims and their families.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kazakhstan-airplane-crash/plane-crashes-in-kazakhstan-shortly-after-takeoff-at-least-14-dead-idUSKBN1YV07H?il=0

Australian wildfires threaten Sydney water supplies

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian authorities said on Friday they are focused on protecting water plants, pumping stations, pipes and other infrastructure from intense bushfires surrounding Sydney, the country’s largest city. Firefighters battling the blazes for weeks received a reprieve of slightly cooler, damper conditions over Christmas, but the respite is not expected to last long. Temperatures in New South Wales (NSW) state are forecast to head back towards 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) early next week, fuelling fires near Warragamba Dam, which provides water to about 80% of Sydney’s 5 million residents.

“In recent days up to the cool change, the fires had been a potential threat to supply and assets, particularly in Warragamba and in the Blue Mountains,” a spokesman for the state’s water authority, WaterNSW, told Reuters. “With the coming very hot conditions the fire situation may escalate in both those fronts and possibly elsewhere.” Warragamba Dam is located 65km (40 miles) west of Sydney, catching water flowing from the mountains. It is at 44.8% capacity, down from almost being full less than three years ago, as a prolonged drought ravages the continent’s east.

Despite the widespread destruction, the state’s water infrastructure network has not been damaged, the spokesman said. There have been eight deaths, including two volunteer firefighters, linked to the blazes since they flared in spring. With more than 40 dams across the state, WaterNSW supplies two-thirds of untreated water to the state’s water utilities, which then treat and clean the resource to provide drinking water to cities and regional towns. Large quantities of ash and burnt material could pose a threat to the quality of water in the dams if the fires are followed by heavy rain. However, there is no significant rain forecast for NSW in the short-term and WaterNSW has put containment barriers to catch potential debris run-off, the water authority said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-bushfires-water/australian-wildfires-threaten-sydney-water-supplies-idUSKBN1YV05N?il=0

>>7630448

Q drop 1358

We fight every sigle day on behalf of you, the people who put us here.

Has this misspelling been caught? sigle/ missing (n)