Probe...

AG

AG. William Barr, a name will be visibly engraved in the hidden world of Intelligence.

President Trump issued a grave warning to those who allegedly "spied" on his 2016 campaign, calling their actions "treason" and saying “long jail sentences” are in order.

“My Campaign for President was conclusively spied on. Nothing like this has ever happened in American Politics.  TREASON means long jail sentences, and this was TREASON!” Trump tweeted.

In AG Bill Barr's testimony he said that "spying did occur" against the Trump campaign in 2016.

The attorney general is leading a formal review into the conduct of that investigation.  It was revealed that Barr had appointed John Durham, the U.S. attorney from Connecticut, to lead that investigation to cover “all intelligence collection activities” related to the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election and any misconduct during the early stages of the FBI’s original Russia probe.

The results will be available right at the neck of time for the preparations for 2020. It is not going to be pretty. Some will go to jail, and others in the media will be sued for millions of dollars. Just a thought.

Rubric...

Attorney General William Barr is working closely with the CIA to review the origins of the Russia investigation and surveillance issues surrounding Donald Trump's presidential campaign.  US attorney John Durham in Connecticut is heading up the effort with Barr.  

At a hearing last month, Barr said, "I think spying did occur" on the Trump campaign.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz is near the end of his investigation into possible abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with respect to targeting former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. 

Since the FISA warrant was the predicate for subsequent surveillance, the impending IG report potentially will reveal whether it was legitimately obtained. Recently revealed text messages between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe show that the issue of biased sources was being hotly contested even days before the warrant application. 

If the warrant was in fact issued on the weight of the notorious “Steele dossier,” which was underwritten by the Clinton campaign, then all that followed could fall under the “improper surveillance” rubric, especially if some FBI employees knew it was bogus all along.

Why..

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced the decision in a White House briefing. Reading a statement from Trump that accused Brennan of making “a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations  wild outbursts on the internet and television  about this Administration

In his May 2017 testimony before the intelligence panel, Brennan emphatically denied the dossier factored into the intelligence community’s publicly released conclusion that Russia meddled in the 2016 election "to help Trump’s chances of victory.” 

Brennan also swore that he did not know who commissioned the anti-Trump research document, even though senior national security and counterintelligence officials at the Justice Department and FBI knew the previous year that the dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Intel...

Here’s one way to be recognized as ‘award-winning’ journalists – collude with intelligence officials to get their best leaks and then hire them later. 

Now, the question is…are Brennan and Clapper leaking top intel to MSNBC and CNN as paid analysts?

Reporters Jake Tapper and others won the Merriman Smith Award for their broadcast work and reporting on the dossier.

James Clapper was suspected by Congress of leaking the information to CNN, after he asked  FBI Director James Comey to give Trump the private briefing on Jan. 6, 2017.

Clapper's resignation "was expected and does not "today" appear to indicate that Clapper is in any trouble or is being forced out," NPR National Security Editor Philip Ewing says. Clapper has told NPR's Mary Louise Kelly that he keeps a calendar counting down the days until he is out of government service.

Outrage...

An Alabama bill intended to test whether Supreme Court appointees will allow for the banning of abortion, threatened to reshape the dynamics of the 2020 election.

Democrats erupted with loud and sustained outrage in an effort to reclaim the upper hand on a politically sensitive issue that has recently found them on the defensive after liberal states proposed extending protections for abortions late in pregnancy.

Republicans leaders, by contrast, spent much of the day avoiding questions about the Alabama law, wary of being dragged into a debate over whether to refuse rape and incest victims the option of abortion following forced pregnancies.

Rectitude...

Day...

Doris Day (April 3, 1922 – May 13, 2019) was an American actress, singer, and animal welfare activist. She began her career as a big band singer in 1939, achieving commercial success in 1945 with two No. 1 recordings, "Sentimental Journey" and "My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time" with Les Brown & His Band of Renown. She left Brown to embark on a solo career and recorded more than 650 songs from 1947 to 1967.

Setups...

Obama-era officials like former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have cast the effort to investigate Russian influence in the Trump campaign as a standard counterintelligence operation. As such, they were just doing their duty.

If foreign entities were attempting seriously to subvert the Trump campaign, it would have made most sense immediately to warn Donald Trump. Once alerted he could have insulated his campaign, and worked actively with the Intelligence Community to expose the malign foreign network.

But the intelligence community treated his campaign like a target. Instead of helping Trump block Russia from penetrating his organization, it seems more like the agencies were hoping to discover that a collusion network was up and running.

The CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center soon became a “conduit to the FBI” feeding information about alleged contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians. But as House testimony from Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos reveals, many such contacts were setups seeking to entrap people tied to Trump. Papadopoulos recently tweeted to Brennan that the assets the CIA “weaponized … are being outed in London, Canberra and Rome,” and that “foreign governments are now cooperating with the Trump administration to out the rest.

” Does the activity Papadopoulos alleges sound like “spying?” It certainly uses the tools of the trade,

Esketamine...

A novel antidepressant, heralded as a breakthrough drug only two months ago, may not be a cost-effective way of battling treatment-resistant depression (TDR), according to a new study.

Esketamine, a nasal spray, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in March for people who do not respond to traditional anti-depressants. Marketed as Spravato, the drug was subject to eight years of research by Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals.  

According to the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), Spravato may be overpriced for the benefits it delivers.  

Each treatment, which must be administered in a physician’s office, costs between $590 and $885.    And that price doesn’t cover the doctor’s time.

The regimen requires twice-weekly office visits that can take up to 90 minutes each plus 2 hrs waiting in the office. Afterwards, a patient may not drive a motor vehicle for the rest of day.

Even when covered by health insurance, out-of-pocket costs can remain considerable and may prevent access to those who may benefit from esketamine.

Blackmail...

Barr is correct on both counts, there was snooping on the Trump campaign, and  an ongoing intelligence investigation became public.

The abuse of power here is what happened after Trump won the election. This is when the investigations themselves and other kinds of surveillance were disclosed to the press. Details about incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition leaked. So did the FBI’s probe of Trump associates and their contacts with Russia, along with the existence of the surveillance warrant on Page himself.  

The New York Times reported in early 2017 that, in the days and weeks leading up to Trump’s inauguration, intelligence and White House officials distributed intelligence on contacts between Russia and Trump associates far and wide.


Brennan briefed was then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who a few days later released a letter to then-FBI director James Comey, urging him to make public intelligence about the Trump campaign and Russia. 

After the election, Brennan became a TV pundit and used his platform to accuse Trump of treason and claim the Russian government was blackmailing him. 
[Eil Lake, Bloomberg]