I RETRACT MY RETRACTION: A cabal of NYC FBI agents (including, or solely, Bret Baier’s false “indictment” leaker), may well have PLANTED those emails on Weiner’s laptop–
possibly at the behest of Rudy Giuliani or James Kallstrom, or both, who ARE part of the cabal’s conspiracy to violate the Hatch Act (to name just one of a slew of federal criminal statutes these folks have violated).*
Did NYC FBI Agents Plant Those Emails on Weiner’s Computer Once They Gained Custody of It? The Evidence Appears to Suggest … Possibly.
— Me, in a post bearing that as its title, Oct. 30
I retracted that the next day, writing, “As for me, I want to forcefully retract my suggestion in this post yesterday that NYC FBI agents working on the Weiner case may have planted the emails of Weiner’s computer.”
And now I am retracting the retraction.
At 1:03 a.m. on Thursday, the Daily Beast published a detailed investigative report by Wayne Garrett titled “Meet Donald Trump’s Top FBI Fanboy” and subtitled “Trump supporters with strong ties to the agency kept talking about surprises and leaks to come—and come they did.”
The words “‘Integrity Questioned’” appear above the title in small red lettering. It is a quote from this paragraph in the article:
Along with Giuliani’s other connections to New York FBI agents, his former law firm, then called Bracewell Giuliani, has long been general counsel to the FBI Agents Association (FBIAA), which represents 13,000 former and current agents. The group, born in the New York FBI office in the early ’80s, was headed until Monday by Rey Tariche, an agent who just retired from the New York FBI office. In Tariche’s letter to the Association stepping down as president because he’s retiring from the Bureau to take a job “within the Banking Industry,” he wrote that “we find our work—our integrity questioned” because of it, adding “we will not be used for political gains.”
The paragraphs preceding that one read:
Hours after Comey’s letter about the renewed probe was leaked on Friday, Giuliani went on a radio show and attributed the director’s surprise action to “the pressure of a group of FBI agents who don’t look at it politically.”
“The other rumor that I get is that there’s a kind of revolution going on inside the FBI about the original conclusion [not to charge Clinton] being completely unjustified and almost a slap in the face to the FBI’s integrity,” said Giuliani. “I know that from former agents. I know that even from a few active agents.”
I follow political news quite closely, yet it wasn’t until late last night that I knew of the Daily Beast article, when I read a comment in the Comments thread to this post of mine, linking to it.
What did get a lot of publicity is Bret Baier’s Wednesday announcements fabricated by what turned out to be the concoction of a single NYC FBI agent. Roger Stone may have played a role in it, but Kallstrom and Giuliani almost certainly did. Giuliani knew a couple of days before Baier’s false reports that these would occur.
In addition to conspiracy to violate the Hatch Act, these people have violated a slew of federal criminal statutes including wire fraud, misuse of government property and personnel, and conspiracy to commit those crimes.
So here’s what I would like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to ask millennials when they campaign today, tomorrow and Monday for Clinton AND Senate and House candidates: Why on earth do they think that the sudden discovery of Huma Abedin’s email correspondence with Clinton on Anthony Weiner’s laptop—however it got there—should entitle Donald Trump to control the FBI, the entire Justice Department, the Supreme Court, and the lower federal courts?
As well as painting with a Republican-controlled Senate and a Republican-controlled House?
Weirdly, apparently this isn’t a rhetorical question. Read the comments of millennials in this article.
They’re just too disgusted with politics, you know, to care who is president and who controls congress, who controls the federal agencies, who controls the Supreme Court, and who controls the entire federal bench, and their own state’s legislatures, see.
Bernie and Elizabeth, please inform them on this. Loudly.
The transformation of the FBI into a government investigative arm and innuendo and false or partial information arm of the Republican Party during elections is a profound matter. And the decision by the FBI director to announce that federal and state law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies should be “transparent” by announcing raw, unformed, and uncertain information about candidates for public office on the eve of elections so that voters will know about it when they vote is serious banana republic stuff.
Comey almost certainly will resign shortly after the election. Succumbing to extortionate threats of leaks by some of the agency’s agents and making a series of ridiculous claims that the devil, er, the law, made him do it, while also outright stating to the agency’s entire employment roster and therefore to all the world that he acted as he did in part to provide voters with in formation he thought they should have before they voted, would, I assume, sort of make it hard for him to remain in that post.
And maybe these faint-of heart millennials should care whether or not it is Trump or Clinton who names the next FBI director. And whether its a Democratic-controlled, or instead a Republican-controlled, Senate that holds (or doesn’t) confirmation hearings on this nominee. And Supreme Court an lower-federal court judicial nominees.
But if that involves just tooooo complex an analysis for them to engage in, there is that email thing that is a handy excuse.
Apparently.
*Post title edited for clarity. 11/5 at 3:23 p.m.
I totally agree with all you have said in this article. I get very tired of those that constantly complain after elections about the way things turned out. The real point for me a huge percent of those complaining when asked are the ones that did not VOTE for one reason or another. It is amazing how some people just cannot seem to grasp the concept that choices they make today will matter for many more tomorrows.
Thus those that choose to vote third party or not vote are casting a vote for the GOP and all of the despicable actions they have chosen to do. The party is clearly declaring “WAR” upon Democracy. They do not believe in anything else but that they must win at all cost and everything must go their way. George Washington spoke of the dangers of a two party system and it appears his concept is coming into reality.
What drives me absolutely CRAZY is how illogically narrow so many people think the president’s reach is. I start talking about the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts and they types of law they actually make, and about federal agency heads and commissions like EPA, Interior, Justice, the SEC, and their eyes widen or they say outright that they hadn’t thought about those things.
I start talking about fiscal things, like tax cuts for the wealthy, and eliminating the social safety net, mentioning specifics, and sometimes they say, “Really?” Or something like it.
This is RIDICULOUS. But it’s very much the Democrats’ fault. They never actually campaign on things like any of this. Clinton sure as hell didn’t, and most of the Senate candidates didn’t either, as far as I know.
And that has been typical for the last 30 years.
Who is James Kallstrom? He was the FBI’s top electronic surveillance expert. Here is what the NYT wrote about him back in 1997 when he first retired from the FBI to take a job in the banking industry:
“A former Marine captain and a Vietnam veteran, Mr. Kallstrom joined the F.B.I. in 1970 and spent most of his career in New York City, heading the unit responsible for electronic monitoring of criminals.
“As the head of the Special Operations Division in New York from 1976 to 1990, Mr. Kallstrom oversaw a band of surveillance experts that grew from 15 to more than 300.”
Thus Agent Kallstrom would have been uniquely connected with sources to conduct email surveillance and furnish the scandalous stuff to WikiLeaks, thus EMBEDDING the supposedly anti-censorship organization in the secret police’s political surveillance and smear operations.
I really don’t believe millennials don’t know those things. I think they are just apathetic and/or progressive fanatics who believe that the Phoenix will rise from the ashes. They’re the same people who didn’t show up in 2010 and 2014 because Obama wasn’t superman. They aren’t stupid, uneducated, or even uninformed. They’re spoiled and self indulgent. But I have no strong opinions about it. They are in the great tradition of the activists who allowed Richard Nixon to become President in 1968.
Daily Beast? The Brietbart of the Alt-left ……. yawn
“What drives me absolutely CRAZY is….”
That was not a drive. It was a short walk.
Aw. Warren. I thought we were friends.
From the article, written by Wayne Barrett, who has been writing about Trump and Giuliani for 40 years:
“It’s clear enough, though, why when Comey sent a note to FBI staff on Friday explaining his decision to inform Congress about the renewed Clinton probe, the scoop about that internal memo went to Fox News. Why Kallstrom gets booked to talked about the Clintons a “crime family.” Why Clinton Cash author Peter Schweitzer, caught in a web of Breitbart and Trump conflicts, would announce on Fox that he was asked in August to sit down with New York office FBI agents investigating the Clinton Foundation (with The New York Times reporting this week that the agents were relying largely on his discredited work when they pitched a fullscale probe).
Fox is the pipeline for the fifth column inside the bureau, a battalion that says it’s doing God’s work, chasing justice against those who are obstructing it, while, in fact, it’s doing GOP work, even on the eve of a presidential election.”
Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Donald Trump, Roger Stone… Michael Mukasey, Rudy Giuliani, James Kallstrom, James Comey… “We had to destroy the democracy in order to save it.”
If the Clintons are the equivalent of a crime family, prove it! You’ve had tens of millions of dollars and several decades to make the case, but where is it — no charge, no trial, no conviction.
Bev, your desperation is palpable with your series of articles. Moreover, I find a couple of points questionable about your completely unsupported assertion.
1) It has been reported that the NYPD, Speical Crimes Unit, was first to collect and review the Weiner laptop. After their review they notified the FBI that it may contain pertinent emails.
2) Your assertion of an FBI conspiracy ignores this item and assumes a small group of NY FBI agents are responsible for placing the emails on the laptop.
Prior to this assertion you were accusing the Russians of planting those emails. So which was it? Russia or the FBI/NYPD (SCU)?
Another point is that this election hangs on the trustworthiness of the candidates. On the national security issue HRCV is clearly a disaster. The latest DoS email tranche release shows Hillary had her uncleared house keeper was commonly used to print off her emails and FAXes. The FAX machine was placed in the Secure Facility in her home for which the house keeper also had unsupervised access.
Just one instance of these actions breaks violated Title 18 793(f)(1). Clearly she has played fast and loose with national security information, which coupled with the issues associated with funding the Clinton Foundations leaves serious questions of trust.
The voters will choose their importance in just hours, but if elected her term is going to be the rockiest seen in many generations.
It has been reported that the NYPD, Speical Crimes Unit, was first to collect and review the Weiner laptop. After their review they notified the FBI that it may contain pertinent emails.
What? What? The NYPD Special Crimes Unit didn’t announce that they had planted emails on Weiner’s hard drive?
It’s also been reported that Abedin didn’t use that laptop, that she made more than 100 foreign trips with Clinton while they were at State, and brought along her own laptop and left Weiner’s with Weiner, and that she also didn’t have Weiner’s laptop with her in her office at State, yet somehow approximately 30,ooo of her personal emails, dating back many years, ended up on the hard drive of Weiner’s laptop.
And although to my knowledge it hasn’t been reported, the FBI’s computer forensics specialists surely have the ability to learn when these emails were put onto that hard drive. All at once? If so, when?
There comes a time in most peoples lives when they must make a serious decisions based on the information at hand. For most Americans next Tuesday is one of those times. This decision is for the future direction of the country will have long lasting ramifications and consequences. It is always best to judge one by the content of ones character, past practices and experiences. If one truly understands this there is no comparison between the two candidates and only one stands above with any true credibility of personal integrity, honor, trust and leadership skills. These are by far the most important traits for any leader of anything to have especially in the highest office of president of the United States. So when voting please consider maintaining the respect and integrity of our country’s highest office. By voting for Trump you will not be throwing your vote and America away.
CoRev,
Great. Now you are playing at being a lawyer.
Somehow I am thinking Comey knows a little bit more about the law than you. Course, my neighbor’s dog knows as much about the law as you, so that should not be surprising.
EM, the arguments are getting weaker, while yours are always comical and angry speculation and innuendo. So when you say Comey know the law, to which version of his announcements do you refer, July or Oct?
The Oct release to Congress was based upon internal FBI and reportedly NYPD (SCU) reviews of the laptop contents. At the time, only one of those entities had a warrant to review them, and presumably notified the FBI of their existence and CONTENT. It was probably the content that triggered Comey;s decision.
Both to a certain extent, but particularly July.
Not because of his decision that there was no there there, but because of his explanation why there was no there there.
Intent. Context.
You have always ignored whatever you did not want to be the truth. And your repeated falsehoods in this topic are a continuation of that behavior.
” It has been reported that the NYPD, Speical Crimes Unit, was first to collect and review the Weiner laptop. After their review they notified the FBI that it may contain pertinent emails.”
Can I perhaps see a link to these “reports”?
A couple of things just because I need to burn off some nervous energy before Tuesday evening. I saw some article suggesting that a former Playboy Playmate had consensual sex with Trump back in 2006 and sold the rights to her story to the National Enquirer for $150K but the newspaper did not publish the story because the publisher is pals with Trump. Frankly, I do not see how the story would at all impact Trump–if you are willing to overlook his non consensual sexual behavior, why would consensual adultery bother you? My inquiry however relates to grocery shopping yesterday and learning from my favorite checkout line news source that Hillary is a Serial Killer, a Raging Alcoholic, a Blackmailer, Has sold our nuclear codes to ISIS in exchange for speaking fees, Is Dying, has Altzheimer’s and I think has been reported to have eaten baby hearts at satanic lesbian rituals. If the publisher has a conflict of interest I think the American public deserve to know this just as they deserve to know whether Comey has a conflict of interest. I also have to comment on the foundation stories and give you some personal perspective. My father was a general practice physician in a fairly rural county in Wisconsin for 40 years. As a boy I listened as he took numerous patient calls at our home and he would often prescribe medications. He always asked “what pharmacy do you use?” and then he would phone it in. In those days there were not the Walgreens and CVS dominance in the market and there were perhaps 10 independent pharmacies in the county. And every Christmas every one of those pharmacies sent my dad a bottle of booze–usually some awful liquer–just to make sure they stayed on his good side. I know because I am in the process of clearing out his house and there is a small room that is filled with those bottles. As I understand the foundation stories, donations were made by countries and individuals who wanted to do business with State, but there is absolutely no evidence that whatever business Hillary did with them was dependent on the donations. Just like the pharmacies sending my dad booze although he never steered a single patient to or away from a pharmacy, the countries and individuals wanted to be sure they stayed on Clinton’s good side but never got anything for it. Now the foundation could have returned the money–which is what Hillary would have had to do if the gift had been to her personally, but that is not “pay to play”.
There is an interesting interview over at OnPoint.com between Assange and Anonymous about the revelation of information and sources for those who really like to speculate and get caught up in the weeds. I know that many likes fiction and fanaticism so if Trump wins you know it probably was the space aliens who planted those emails. Comey knows that back in July that justice was not served as he was and continues to be held back by the DOJ. So now in November he wants to make the wrong righted and has the support of the entire agency to do so. He is saving the credibility of his agency.This is not rocket science or some Agatha Christy mystery but rather something more like a true to life Elliot Ness Untouchables story where HRC is the main culprit…
Bev – We’ve been around this before. To be in violation of the Hatch Act one must prove intent. It is the same thing a HRC faced in July. She did a bunch of dumb things with her emails, but there was not intent to harm the government. Same with Comey. Until you prove his actions were intended to cause harm there is is no violation.
the Hatch Act does not focus
on the effect of the employee’s
conduct, but the intent.
Also, just who did put the HRC emails on Weiner’s compute?. So far you have named the Russians, the FBI, NYPD, Juliani and Kalstrom. Please clarify your accusations. Who did plant this info?
And just what are you going to say when it is established that the emails are there because Huma made a mistake, and this was a significant breach of security? Are you going to continue to blame the FBI or the Russians? Will you re-retract your retraction, retraction?
Are you trying to be serious with your writing, or just spoofing us? A retraction of a retraction? Please……
A tempest in a teapot. Comey says, THERE’S NOTHING THERE! I guess he’s saved any attacks on his job. For now.
No sh*t Jack. This has all the makings of just causing trouble, just to cause trouble.
Krugman retweeted a tweet from Jamelle Boie, of Slate, saying, “If Mitch McConnell has a majority next January, he should send Comey a nice bottle of bourbon.”
Yes.
I do not have time to put this up; but, an old friend at Vox did write about it. Matt Yglesias Calls It on the Clinton Email Scandal
“ A bullshit story has dominated the campaign” which has resulted in networks spending more coverage time on 33,000 emails than on what is critically important to electing a president . . . policy issues. Today’s America has bigger issues to resolve than rehashing an email server and Clinton’s emails which in the end have proven nothing.
Au contraire, Jack. He’s gonna resign, effective the day after the inauguration. If not sooner.
I mean, this guy told law enforcement all over the country, and all the world, that politically sensitive investigations should be transparent as they are occurring and even before there is any understanding of the meaning, accuracy, whatever, of the raw information. At least if an election is imminent, or if a partisan legislative body obtained your promise–under oath!–that you will report to them immediately any new info that could tilt the election in favor of their party.
This guy also said he did what he did partly because he was being extorted by FBI agents, upon threat that they would leak the info.
And who apparently just shrugged at the release of information by an agent that the FBI was investigating Clinton Foundation stuff during Clinton’s tenure at the State Dept., and said an indictment is imminent. and at Giuliani’s public admission that he’s been tipped off ahead of time about these things.
Or maybe he didn’t shrug, but it doesn’t matter, because a complaint has been filed with the DoJ’s inspector general on these things.
But any way you look at the events of the last 10 days, Comey’s at best an incompetent idiot.
Hillary fans can go back to proffering their undying love for Comey.
All these mental 180’s could give one a case of emotional whiplash.
So I guess the Russian FBI Putin hackerz didn’t plant anything on the laptop after all. Can we expect a detraction of the unretraction of the retraction?
Krasting
to prove intent all you have to do is convince a jury “beyond a reasonable doubt” that there was intent.
looks like intent to me.
I think Krasting is saying that since Mitch McConnell flew to NYC when he saw those polls two weeks ago showing that the Dems would win control of the Senate, and bought a gun there and sneaked it through security at the Federal Building, and went to the FBI office and held the gun to these agents’ heads and forced them to comply with his orders, there’s no intent.
Except on McConnell’s part.
Either that or the devil made them do it. Which, on second thought, is pretty much the same thing.
I doubt he’ll retire. Obama isn’t going to fire him and Hillary won’t be able to without starting the Hatfields and the McCoys with the Republican House. Come to think of it, that’s started already isn’t it? Still, she won’t want to add fuel to the fire.
HT needs to resign, soon
Doesn’t matter if he had malice in his heart, or was doing his best, or even if he did the best that was possible.
An FBI director that gets this deep into an election needs to go. It is his patriotic duty to see to it that an FBI director in this situation resigns.
He… Sigh.
You are telling us what we already know . . . politics still prevail . . . for those who may not know . . .
Bronco, you just do not understand this whole thing, do you?
No Dems, let alone no honest Americans, “loved” Comey because of his July decision. They were appalled.
No, all Americans should have freaked out about the actions of Comey these last several months.
Starting with his unprecedented “scolding” of Clinton in July, his blatant politicizing of the FBI has been unprecedented and appalling. His job is not, in any way shape or form, to criticize the actions of a person. It is to recommend charges be filed or not. End of story.
And he totally exceeded that level of politicizing with this latest stunt.
Just look at the timeline. The FBI became aware of these emails in the beginning of October. They could have easily obtained a warrant and did their review well before Comey’s “October Surprise”.
That is not what he wanted, and not what the FBI wanted.
His actions throughout this process have sullied the reputation of the FBI beyond anything Hoover himself did.
Beverly, I thought we could be both crazy AND friends! 🙂