Iran

In 2009 the FBI, then headed by Robert Mueller, requested the assistance of Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska in an operation to retrieve former FBI officer and CIA resource Robert Levinson who was captured in Iran two years earlier. The agent assigned to engage Deripaska was Andrew McCabe; the primary FBI need was financing and operational support. Deripaska spent around $25 million and would have succeeded except the U.S. State Department, then headed by Hillary Clinton, backed out

Ramifications of Oleg Deripaska and Contact By FBI in September 2016…

Bob Hope once asked a question...

You mean like Democrats?

This Maltese Professor May Hold The Key To When The FBI Really Began Surveilling The Trump Campaign

Did Joseph Mifsud use George Papadopoulos as a pawn to set up Donald Trump? Did he feed Papadopoulos information about Russia to see how the Trump campaign responded?

IG soon, yup, bananas.
=================

At Trump’s Urging, Justice Department Expands Investigation of Investigators

Clipe
"Big fleas have little fleas,
Upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
and so, ad infinitum."

May 22, 2018 at 7:06 AM | Supertroll

Trump's hair and scalp should be easy to de-flea, with separate treatments being available. Team Obama/Clinton fleas, have developed some form of immunity to eradication over the last 20+ years, and seem to be rooted quite deeply.

May 23, 2018 at 5:57 AM | tomo

The DC of Washington DC did refer to District of Columbia. Democrat Corruption still seems to be dominating the Political agenda in Washington.

The Democrats know that once Mueller concludes, the real swamp draining will start. Both Democrats and Republicans are looking to the Mid Term Elections in Nov 2018.

Tinker, Tailor, Clapper, Carter, Downer, Halper, Spy

by Mark Steyn
Steyn on America
May 22, 2018

Hmm. If you'll forgive another Patti Lupone-type digression, many years ago our mutual pal Ned Sherrin decided to launch, just for a laugh, a rumor that me and Carol Thatcher (Mrs T's daughter) were having an affair. Ned told somebody, and somebody told somebody else, and about eight months later it turned up as an item in Nigel Dempster's highly authoritative Daily Mail gossip column, along with a rather goofy picture of me and Carol at a David Frost shindig at the Grosvenor House in Park Lane. And Ned was stunned - because he assumed the Daily Mail story was true. Because, by the time it circled back to him, he'd clean forgotten he'd started the whole business.

Oddly enough, that's exactly how James Comey and Andrew McCabe and John Brennan work. At the FISA court, the FBI, to bolster their reliance on the Steele dossier, pointed to newspaper stories appearing to corroborate aspects of it - even though, as he subsequently testified under oath at the Old Bailey, those stories were in fact fed to those reporters by Steele himself. Nevertheless, it works like a charm on gullible FISA judges. You take one thing and you make it two things. Or even better, you take nothing and you make it a thing: Here, from yesterday's letter by Senator Ron Johnson, are McCabe, Sally Yates and other FBI/DOJ honchos arranging for Comey to brief Trump on the Steele dossier for the sole purpose of giving CNN a news peg for leaking details about what's in it.

Yes, the FBI Was Investigating the Trump Campaign When It Spied

Trey Gowdy and Marco Rubio evidently paid little attention to testimony before their own committees on how Obama officials made the Trump campaign the subject of a counterintelligence investigation.

Well, well, well. The bipartisan Beltway establishment has apparently had its fill of this “Trump colluded with Russia” narrative — the same narrative the same establishment has lustily peddled for nearly two years. The Obama administration recklessly chose to deploy the government’s awesome counterintelligence powers to investigate — and, more to the point, to smear — its political opposition as a Kremlin confederate. Now that this ploy has blown up on the Justice Department and the FBI, these agencies — the ones that went out of their way, and outside their guidelines, to announce to the world that the Trump campaign was under investigation — want you to know the president and his campaign were not investigated at all, no siree.

What could possibly have made you imagine such a thing?

Long Overdue, Overhaul of the U.S. Criminal-Justice System May Have Begun

The assault on the Trump presidency and his counterattack on his tormentors will run their course. But the best possible result that could come from this affair, apart from the end of the routine criminalization of policy differences between partisan political opponents, would be a massive overhaul of the medieval torture chamber of the American criminal-justice system. The plea bargain must cease to be a process of extorting and suborning perjured inculpatory testimony under threat of prosecution and inducement by immunity for the catechized perjury. Notions of civilized penal reform must return, such as assisting convicted people to learn how to earn honest incomes on release, and encouraging wholesome relationships with families and friends during incarceration. The entire spirit of the system must change, from unlimited punitive severity in pursuit of political kudos, to policies that encourage law-abiding conduct as efficiently as possible, facilitate rehabilitation where it is reasonable to aspire to it, while protecting the public from wrongdoers with any tendency to violence.

If these ends are served, the nasty and tawdry political struggle in Washington in which the president has torn off the pompous fraudulent facade of American official justice and exposed its unsalubrious innards will have been very much worth this immense distraction.

By J.R. Dunn

Wrapping It Up

What's telling, and almost difficult to credit, is how flipped the whole operation has become. What must have appeared the slam-dunk of nailing the brash, boisterous Donald Trump has, in little over a year's time, inverted itself, as if it had slipped through some other dimension, so that every shot fired at Trump boomerangs and hits somebody in the Mueller-Comey posse. It seems that not a week goes by without yet another clown being hoist on the "collusion" petard, to dance across the public stage with his (or her) britches on fire before being dispatched into retirement or an assignment to the FBI's Point Barrow office. While Trump leaps from one triumph to the next, each unimaginable coming from any other president since Reagan, his pursuers' reputations have been crushed, their careers destroyed, and even the futures of the agencies sponsoring the witch hunt – Justice, the FBI, the NSA, CIA – placed in jeopardy.

But now it is over, and all that remains is the endgame – who does the time and how much.

The look on Shinzō Abe's face is priceless,

More Trump-hating lovebirds: Ali Watkins and the rise of casting-couch journalism

The photo that's doing the rounds is a good 'un

Jun 9, 2018 at 8:40 PM | tomo

After such close scrutiny, what did they decide about Trump's hair care scheme?

GC - who needs DJT's hair when you've Trudeau's eyebrow?

Jun 10, 2018 at 9:24 PM | tomo

Is it really Trudeau's eyebrow? Was it borrowed from the Pinewood Studios make up box of trickery, as used by Roger Moore in James Bond? The complex micro processors that allowed such intricate stunts were too expensive then, to justify a matching pair

GC - who needs DJT's hair when you've Trudeau's eyebrow?
Jun 10, 2018 at 9:24 PM | Registered Commentertomo

Browbeaten? Taking fake brows to a browfight?

tomo, Trudeau was after quick-win publicity, and thought he was going to emerge as a World Statesman. The result has been good for Canada

Leader of the free world meets president of the United States

https://twitter.com/TweetsFromADork/status/1005538867129307136/photo/1
https://twitter.com/HecklerForever/status/1005681087383625729/photo/1

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/11/g7-photo-of-trump-merkel-becomes-classic-art