Obama's spies are running scared

Bill Barr's testimony flashed the light on the cockroaches, who are scurrying for cover now. Obama's attempted coup could send some of his henchmen or his henchmen's henchmen to prison.

Others also want to cover certain parts of their anatomy, which is why the New York Times ran on Thursday, "F.B.I. Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to Meet With Trump Aide in 2016."

By investigator, they mean spy.

The story began, "The conversation at a London bar in September 2016 took a strange turn when the woman sitting across from George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, asked a direct question: Was the Trump campaign working with Russia?

"The woman had set up the meeting to discuss foreign policy issues. But she was actually a government investigator posing as a research assistant, according to people familiar with the operation. The F.B.I. sent her to London as part of the counterintelligence inquiry opened that summer to better understand the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.

"The American government’s affiliation with the woman, who said her name was Azra Turk, is one previously unreported detail of an operation that has become a political flash point in the face of accusations by President Trump and his allies that American law enforcement and intelligence officials spied on his campaign to undermine his electoral chances. Last year, he called it Spygate.

"The decision to use Ms. Turk in the operation aimed at a presidential campaign official shows the level of alarm inside the F.B.I. during a frantic period when the bureau was trying to determine the scope of Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 election, but could also give ammunition to Mr. Trump and his allies for their spying claims.

"Ms. Turk went to London to help oversee the politically sensitive operation, working alongside a longtime informant, the Cambridge professor Stefan A. Halper. The move was a sign that the bureau wanted in place a trained investigator for a layer of oversight, as well as someone who could gather information for or serve as a credible witness in any potential prosecution that emerged from the case.

"A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment, as did a lawyer for Mr. Halper, Robert D. Luskin. Last year, Bill Priestap, then the bureau’s top counterintelligence agent who was deeply involved in the Russia inquiry, told Congress during a closed-door hearing that there was no F.B.I. conspiracy against Mr. Trump or his campaign.

"The London operation yielded no fruitful information, but F.B.I. officials have called the bureau’s activities in the months before the election both legal and carefully considered under extraordinary circumstances. They are now under scrutiny as part of an investigation by Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general. He could make the results public in May or June, Attorney General William P. Barr has said. Some of the findings are likely to be classified."

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The target of this attempt to infiltrate and cripple a political opponent's campaign, George Papadopoulos, tweeted, "I agree with everything in this superb article except Azra Turk clearly was not FBI. She was CIA and affiliated with Turkish intel. She could hardly speak English and was tasked to meet me about my work in the energy sector offshore Israel/Cyprus which Turkey was competing with."

The story is an indictment of both the direction of American intelligence operation under Obama and the quality of its work.

Obama turned our international spying around to spy on Americans. Instead of checking to see what the Iranians, Red Chinese, or North Koreans were up to, Obama spied on Donald John Trump and other private American citizens.

And his spies were inept.

Papadopoulos was not fooled. He did not bite on the bait.

The New York Times has known about this for a long time. Obama gave the newspaper access to transcripts of unconstitutional spying on Americans, and we have known that since January 20, 2017, when the Times did a front-page story about it.

The American press which markets itself falsely as some sort of constitutional check and balance on the president (it is not; that is the job of Congress) not only looked the other way from Obama's massive abuse of power, but participated in it.

Obama and his corrupt cronies would have been safe if they had just left the White House peacefully,

But nooooooooooooooooooo.

He had to try to ruin President Donald John Trump with Obama's Russian Dossier. Obama was so clever that he triggered an investigation of The Donald.

But that backfired when they could not find an iota of misdeed by President Trump. Instead, we have learned that Obama hired henchmen to pee on the Constitution.

And that, my friends, is why today there are those in Washington who are sweating bullets because they may land in prison for carrying out unlawful orders. They are only mid-level creeps. But at least there will be some justice.

Mollie Hemingway wrote, "So long as anti-Trump operatives controlled the FBI and DOJ, this type of leaking and concealing of information worked well. Most major media outlets have chosen to ignore the spying scandal in favor of non-stop anti-Trump advocacy. That left actual fact-finding and truth-seeking to a small group of media outlets and a handful of elected lawmakers tasked with oversight of the nation’s spy agencies.

"When William Barr took over as attorney general, it was the first time in years the agency had any real political accountability. Trump’s first attorney general recused himself from overseeing anything related to the 2016 campaign, and his deputy who took over is alleged to have been involved in a conspiracy to oust the president.

"While Barr was adamant that Mueller’s special counsel probe be unimpeded and his report fully published, he scared the anti-Trump forces in and out of government when he said spying on opposing political campaigns is inappropriate. His public vow to examine whether the widespread spying operation against Trump and his affiliates was lawful and appropriate sent shockwaves through an organized anti-Trump political operation that had completely controlled the narrative until recently."

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One final note: A corrupted FBI served many well. Democrats used it to shake down billions from corporations who Chuck Schumer's lawyer, Preet Bharara, sued and settled as the U.S. attorney for Wall Street (Southern District of New York). The money went to tax-exempt groups Democrats control in a money laundering operation that would give drug dealers pause.

If you want to know why Facebook and the rest are cracking down on conservatives, it is simple. They fear a return of Bharara, this time as attorney general for the next Democrat president. They are capitulating now because they have nothing to fear from President Trump.

Or so they think.