Post by the Scribe on Sept 24, 2020 18:59:35 GMT
Panicked that their reign of terror is coming to an end for lack of ability to steal the election Trumpservatives are increasing efforts to whittle down their enemies list. These people really are the party of NIXON. And Trump himself is Nixon on steroids. At least Nixon had a conscience...more or less. Trump is stone cold psychopathic and his followers typical sociopaths.
In Politically Charged Inquiry, Durham Sought Details About Scrutiny of Clintons
news.yahoo.com/politically-charged-inquiry-durham-sought-123711949.html
The New York Times
Adam Goldman, William K. Rashbaum and Nicole Hong, The New York Times•September 24, 2020
Hillary Clinton speaks at an event in Washington on Feb. 19, 2020. (Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — From the beginning, John Durham’s inquiry into the Russia investigation has been politically charged. President Donald Trump promoted it as certain to uncover a “deep state” plot against him, Attorney General William Barr rebuked the investigators under scrutiny, and he and Durham publicly second-guessed an independent inspector general and traveled the globe to chase down conspiracy theories.
It turns out that Durham also focused attention on certain political enemies of Trump: the Clintons.
Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut assigned by Barr to review the Russia inquiry, has sought documents and interviews about how federal law enforcement officials handled an investigation around the same time into allegations of political corruption at the Clinton Foundation, according to people familiar with the matter.
Durham’s team members have suggested to others that they are comparing the two investigations as well as examining whether investigators in the Russia inquiry flouted laws or policies. It was not clear whether Durham’s investigators were similarly looking for violations in the Clinton Foundation investigation, nor whether the comparison would be included or play a major role in the outcome of Durham’s inquiry.
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The approach is highly unusual, according to people briefed on the investigation. Though the suspected crimes themselves are not comparable — one involves a possible conspiracy between a presidential campaign and a foreign adversary to interfere in an election, and the other involves potential bribery and corruption — and largely included different teams of investigators and prosecutors, Durham’s efforts suggest the scope of his review is broader than previously known.
Durham’s focus on the Clinton Foundation inquiry comes as concerns deepen among Democrats and some former Justice Department officials that his investigation is being weaponized politically to help Trump. Congressional Democrats last week called on the department’s inspector general to investigate whether Durham’s review was free from political influence after his top aide abruptly resigned, reportedly over concerns that the team’s findings would be prematurely released before the election in November.
The Clinton Foundation investigation began more than five years ago, under the Obama administration, and stalled in part because some former career law enforcement officials viewed the case as too weak to issue subpoenas. Ultimately, prosecutors in Arkansas secured a subpoena for the charity in early 2018. To date, the case has not resulted in criminal charges.
Some former law enforcement officials declined to talk to Durham’s team about the foundation investigation because they felt the nature of his inquiry was highly unusual, according to people familiar with the investigation. Durham’s staff members sought information about the debate over the subpoenas that the FBI tried to obtain in 2016 and have also approached current agents about the matter, but it is not clear what they told investigators.
A spokesman for Durham declined to comment.
“The Clinton Foundation has regularly been subjected to baseless, politically motivated allegations, and time after time these allegations have been proven false,” the foundation said in a statement.
Right-wing news media and prominent Republicans have long promoted a narrative that the FBI’s leadership and the Justice Department under the Obama administration were biased in favor of Hillary Clinton. They have accused agents and prosecutors of aggressively investigating Trump and his associates — ignoring evidence to the contrary — while moving more cautiously on allegations of corruption at the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct government business while she was secretary of state.
“There was a clear double standard by the Department of Justice and FBI when it came to the Trump and Clinton campaigns in 2016,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a staunch supporter of Trump.
In the Russia investigation, FBI officials did take aggressive steps such as obtaining a secret wiretap to eavesdrop on a former Trump adviser. But they also moved quietly, deploying informants and an undercover agent in part to keep the existence of the investigation from becoming public and affecting the 2016 election.
Barr has repeatedly attacked the Russia inquiry as Durham has investigated it, calling it “one of the greatest travesties in American history” and ignoring a policy that generally prohibits the department from making public statements about current investigations. Barr’s statements have raised hopes among the president’s supporters that Durham will unearth evidence of a plot to sabotage Trump’s campaign and presidency.
So far, only one person has been charged with criminal wrongdoing: Kevin E. Clinesmith, a former FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to altering an email that investigators relied on to renew an application for a secret wiretap on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The president and his Republican allies have tried to cast the Clinton Foundation, a philanthropic organization, as corrupt, accusing Clinton of taking steps as secretary of state to support the interests of foundation donors.
Critics have suggested that she was part of a quid pro quo in which the foundation received large donations in exchange for supporting the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian company with ties to mining stakes in the United States, to a Russian nuclear agency. The deal was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States when Clinton was secretary of state under President Barack Obama and had a voting seat on the panel.
The allegations against Clinton were advanced in the book “Clinton Cash,” by Peter Schweizer, a senior editor at large at Breitbart News, the right-wing outlet once controlled by Trump’s former top aide Steve Bannon. The book contained multiple errors, and the foundation has dismissed its allegations.
But the book caught the attention of FBI agents, who viewed some of its contents as additional justification to obtain a subpoena for foundation records.
Top Justice Department officials denied a request in 2016 from senior FBI managers in Washington to secure a subpoena, determining that the bureau lacked a sufficient basis for it and that the book had a political agenda, former officials said. Some prosecutors at the time felt the book had been discredited.
The decision frustrated some agents who believed they had enough evidence beyond the book, including a discussion that touched on the foundation and was captured on a wiretap in an unrelated investigation. Other FBI officials at the time believed the conversation’s relevance to the foundation case was tenuous at best.
The disagreement erupted anew later in the summer of 2016, when a top Justice Department official suspected that FBI agents in New York were trying to persuade federal prosecutors in Brooklyn to authorize a subpoena after the department’s officials in Washington had declined such a request. By the time the FBI officials revisited the issue, the Justice Department officials were also concerned that serving subpoenas would violate the practice of avoiding such investigative activity so close to an election.
Ultimately, the Clinton Foundation dispute embroiled Andrew McCabe, then the FBI deputy director, who was accused of leaking information about the case to a reporter and later lying about it to the Justice Department inspector general. The episode helped prompt McCabe’s firing in 2018 and a failed effort by the Justice Department to prosecute him.
The foundation case — which had been spread among FBI field offices in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Arkansas — sputtered until Trump was elected. In early 2018, Patrick C. Harris, a career prosecutor in Little Rock, issued a grand jury subpoena for foundation records, two former law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation said.
A foundation official confirmed that the charity was served with a subpoena and complied with the request for information.
Republicans in 2017 had called for a second special counsel to investigate the foundation, but Rod Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, did not believe the scant evidence collected in the case justified one, a person familiar with the matter said. Instead, Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time, asked John W. Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, to review whether federal law enforcement officials had fully investigated the matter.
Shortly after Durham began his review, Barr said in an interview with CBS News in May 2019 that Huber was winding down his work related to Clinton. In January, The Washington Post reported that Huber’s investigation had ended; its findings were not made public. Trump later attacked Huber, accusing him of doing “absolutely NOTHING.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2020 The New York Times Company
In Politically Charged Inquiry, Durham Sought Details About Scrutiny of Clintons
news.yahoo.com/politically-charged-inquiry-durham-sought-123711949.html
The New York Times
Adam Goldman, William K. Rashbaum and Nicole Hong, The New York Times•September 24, 2020
Hillary Clinton speaks at an event in Washington on Feb. 19, 2020. (Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — From the beginning, John Durham’s inquiry into the Russia investigation has been politically charged. President Donald Trump promoted it as certain to uncover a “deep state” plot against him, Attorney General William Barr rebuked the investigators under scrutiny, and he and Durham publicly second-guessed an independent inspector general and traveled the globe to chase down conspiracy theories.
It turns out that Durham also focused attention on certain political enemies of Trump: the Clintons.
Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut assigned by Barr to review the Russia inquiry, has sought documents and interviews about how federal law enforcement officials handled an investigation around the same time into allegations of political corruption at the Clinton Foundation, according to people familiar with the matter.
Durham’s team members have suggested to others that they are comparing the two investigations as well as examining whether investigators in the Russia inquiry flouted laws or policies. It was not clear whether Durham’s investigators were similarly looking for violations in the Clinton Foundation investigation, nor whether the comparison would be included or play a major role in the outcome of Durham’s inquiry.
- ADVERTISEMENT -
The approach is highly unusual, according to people briefed on the investigation. Though the suspected crimes themselves are not comparable — one involves a possible conspiracy between a presidential campaign and a foreign adversary to interfere in an election, and the other involves potential bribery and corruption — and largely included different teams of investigators and prosecutors, Durham’s efforts suggest the scope of his review is broader than previously known.
Durham’s focus on the Clinton Foundation inquiry comes as concerns deepen among Democrats and some former Justice Department officials that his investigation is being weaponized politically to help Trump. Congressional Democrats last week called on the department’s inspector general to investigate whether Durham’s review was free from political influence after his top aide abruptly resigned, reportedly over concerns that the team’s findings would be prematurely released before the election in November.
The Clinton Foundation investigation began more than five years ago, under the Obama administration, and stalled in part because some former career law enforcement officials viewed the case as too weak to issue subpoenas. Ultimately, prosecutors in Arkansas secured a subpoena for the charity in early 2018. To date, the case has not resulted in criminal charges.
Some former law enforcement officials declined to talk to Durham’s team about the foundation investigation because they felt the nature of his inquiry was highly unusual, according to people familiar with the investigation. Durham’s staff members sought information about the debate over the subpoenas that the FBI tried to obtain in 2016 and have also approached current agents about the matter, but it is not clear what they told investigators.
A spokesman for Durham declined to comment.
“The Clinton Foundation has regularly been subjected to baseless, politically motivated allegations, and time after time these allegations have been proven false,” the foundation said in a statement.
Right-wing news media and prominent Republicans have long promoted a narrative that the FBI’s leadership and the Justice Department under the Obama administration were biased in favor of Hillary Clinton. They have accused agents and prosecutors of aggressively investigating Trump and his associates — ignoring evidence to the contrary — while moving more cautiously on allegations of corruption at the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct government business while she was secretary of state.
“There was a clear double standard by the Department of Justice and FBI when it came to the Trump and Clinton campaigns in 2016,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a staunch supporter of Trump.
In the Russia investigation, FBI officials did take aggressive steps such as obtaining a secret wiretap to eavesdrop on a former Trump adviser. But they also moved quietly, deploying informants and an undercover agent in part to keep the existence of the investigation from becoming public and affecting the 2016 election.
Barr has repeatedly attacked the Russia inquiry as Durham has investigated it, calling it “one of the greatest travesties in American history” and ignoring a policy that generally prohibits the department from making public statements about current investigations. Barr’s statements have raised hopes among the president’s supporters that Durham will unearth evidence of a plot to sabotage Trump’s campaign and presidency.
So far, only one person has been charged with criminal wrongdoing: Kevin E. Clinesmith, a former FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to altering an email that investigators relied on to renew an application for a secret wiretap on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The president and his Republican allies have tried to cast the Clinton Foundation, a philanthropic organization, as corrupt, accusing Clinton of taking steps as secretary of state to support the interests of foundation donors.
Critics have suggested that she was part of a quid pro quo in which the foundation received large donations in exchange for supporting the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian company with ties to mining stakes in the United States, to a Russian nuclear agency. The deal was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States when Clinton was secretary of state under President Barack Obama and had a voting seat on the panel.
The allegations against Clinton were advanced in the book “Clinton Cash,” by Peter Schweizer, a senior editor at large at Breitbart News, the right-wing outlet once controlled by Trump’s former top aide Steve Bannon. The book contained multiple errors, and the foundation has dismissed its allegations.
But the book caught the attention of FBI agents, who viewed some of its contents as additional justification to obtain a subpoena for foundation records.
Top Justice Department officials denied a request in 2016 from senior FBI managers in Washington to secure a subpoena, determining that the bureau lacked a sufficient basis for it and that the book had a political agenda, former officials said. Some prosecutors at the time felt the book had been discredited.
The decision frustrated some agents who believed they had enough evidence beyond the book, including a discussion that touched on the foundation and was captured on a wiretap in an unrelated investigation. Other FBI officials at the time believed the conversation’s relevance to the foundation case was tenuous at best.
The disagreement erupted anew later in the summer of 2016, when a top Justice Department official suspected that FBI agents in New York were trying to persuade federal prosecutors in Brooklyn to authorize a subpoena after the department’s officials in Washington had declined such a request. By the time the FBI officials revisited the issue, the Justice Department officials were also concerned that serving subpoenas would violate the practice of avoiding such investigative activity so close to an election.
Ultimately, the Clinton Foundation dispute embroiled Andrew McCabe, then the FBI deputy director, who was accused of leaking information about the case to a reporter and later lying about it to the Justice Department inspector general. The episode helped prompt McCabe’s firing in 2018 and a failed effort by the Justice Department to prosecute him.
The foundation case — which had been spread among FBI field offices in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Arkansas — sputtered until Trump was elected. In early 2018, Patrick C. Harris, a career prosecutor in Little Rock, issued a grand jury subpoena for foundation records, two former law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation said.
A foundation official confirmed that the charity was served with a subpoena and complied with the request for information.
Republicans in 2017 had called for a second special counsel to investigate the foundation, but Rod Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, did not believe the scant evidence collected in the case justified one, a person familiar with the matter said. Instead, Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time, asked John W. Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, to review whether federal law enforcement officials had fully investigated the matter.
Shortly after Durham began his review, Barr said in an interview with CBS News in May 2019 that Huber was winding down his work related to Clinton. In January, The Washington Post reported that Huber’s investigation had ended; its findings were not made public. Trump later attacked Huber, accusing him of doing “absolutely NOTHING.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2020 The New York Times Company