Ronald Reagan got paid $2 million to make two speeches in Japan. After him, George HW Bush also got into the speech business. Gerald Ford is considered the first ex-President to really cash in, unless you count Nixon's payday with David Frost. Hard to pin this slushy graft as an idea invented by Bill Clinton. Whatabout everybody.

Who was paying attention to that? The NYTimes wasn't buying it at the time. Yet everyone (including the NYTimes) was going ape about the Wiener/Abedin laptop. Lock her up! Lock her up!

Russia hacks a couple of Democratic servers

Well, hacking the DNC's servers was clearly a crime.

A text from an FBI agent in 2016 says “the White House is running this”, referring to the opening of the Trump investigation, and today’s press corps pays it no attention. It’s amazing the press looks the other way. And they wonder why people think they’re biased.

Hey, remind us again why the Bureau never took possession of those servers? Why was Clinton-affiliated Crowdstrike permitted to hold onto them?

Because that's not how computer investigations work. It's not like finding a possible murder weapon at the crime scene and they have to take possession of the weapon to test it for DNA evidence, fingerprints, etc. With a computer, the physical device is unimportant. They image the servers, and get the network logs and such. That is the evidence; the servers themselves have no evidentiary value.

They image the servers, and get the network logs and such. That is the evidence; the servers themselves have no evidentiary value.

Washington (CNN)The Democratic National Committee "rebuffed" a request from the FBI to examine its computer services after it was allegedly hacked by Russia during the 2016 election, a senior law enforcement official told CNN Thursday.

"The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated," a senior law enforcement official told CNN. "This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier."

This statement is in response to reports that the FBI never asked the DNC for access to the hacked systems.

The DNC told Buzzfeed News that they did not receive a request from the FBI to access their computer servers.

"The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI's Cyber Division and its Washington Field Office, the Department of Justice's National Security Division, and US Attorney's Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation, but the FBI never requested access to the DNC's computer servers," Eric Walker, the DNC's deputy communications director, told BuzzFeed News.

The FBI instead relied on the assessment from a third-party security company called CrowdStrIke.

Otherwise, any administration, including Trump’s, could initiate an investigation for whatever cooked-up superficial reason it wanted.

The October surprise thing is disingenuous. The FBI not only didn't leak the Trump investigation, they went out of their way to deny it to the NY Times (same story linked in 198).

WH Says DOJ IG Probe Expanding ‘Based On The Meeting With The President’

Only in the land of hacks is using an enterprise grade cybersecurity company a sign of a conspiracy.

The president, who relies on cellphones to reach his friends and millions of Twitter followers, has rebuffed staff efforts to strengthen security around his phone use, according to the administration officials.

The president uses at least two iPhones, according to one of the officials. The phones — one capable only of making calls, the other equipped only with the Twitter app and preloaded with a handful of news sites — are issued by White House Information Technology and the White House Communications Agency, an office staffed by military personnel that oversees White House telecommunications.

While aides have urged the president to swap out the Twitter phone on a monthly basis, Trump has resisted their entreaties, telling them it was “too inconvenient,” the same administration official said.

The president has gone as long as five months without having the phone checked by security experts. It is unclear how often Trump’s call-capable phones, which are essentially used as burner phones, are swapped out.

The October surprise thing is disingenuous. The FBI not only didn't leak the Trump investigation, they went out of their way to deny it to the NY Times (same story linked in 198).

Well, hacking the DNC's servers was clearly a crime.

Except those were the DNC's servers, not Hillary's.

Sigh. Harsanyi was referencing a POTUS campaign.

You're pathetic.

Do we know the forensics work was done? AFAIK, the FBI relied on Crowdstrike to perform the analysis.

They image the servers, and get the network logs and such. That is the evidence; the servers themselves have no evidentiary value.

Normally, they do that themselves, not wait on the "victim" to designate a financially-connected third-party vendor to provide the data, thereby creating potential chain-of-custody issues that could hamper any actual prosecution.

The answer might be more than you think. It’s common for the initial forensic analysis to be conducted by outside firms like CrowdStrike, and once that data has been copied, there’s often little need to copy it again. BuzzFeed described the FBI’s lack of interest in the DNC’s server as unusual, citing a number of response firms that preferred not to be named. But that’s not a unanimous opinion, and two experts contacted by The Verge disagreed that it was unusual.

“This is normal practice,” says Matt Tait, founder and CEO of Capital Alpha Security. “In cases like this, the onus for digital forensics is on the third-party contracted by the company that's calling in the incident response team, in this case CrowdStrike.”

It’s part of a long-standing division of labor between private firms and law enforcement, in which incident response firms handle the initial analysis and network cleanup, leaving broader legal questions to law enforcement. That division of labor saves time, but it also protects companies from what could potentially be seen as an invasion of privacy. Turning over a company’s entire network to a law enforcement agency can be an awkward proposition, particularly before the nature of the compromise is clear.

The ABGL article you cite asserts the Bureau was indeed investigating the Russia issue, including what the Trump campaign was up to, but had not yet found any direct evidence of criminal activity.

Are you seriously calling that exculpatory?

The FBI could have leaked anti-Trump material but instead we got this: "Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia"

Gerry Doyle
‏I’ve found it. I’ve found the most American tweet.

Sean T. Collins
This is the gofundme for the man with terminal cancer whose wife had to go back to work to pay for it and was murdered in school the other day.
https://www.gofundme.com/lung-stem-cell-treatment-for-ipf…

I mean, yes... but I'm not sure what you're getting at. Why "except"?

They know this, they won't address it, and you know they won't address it

They image the servers, and get the network logs and such. That is the evidence; the servers themselves have no evidentiary value.

Normally, they do that themselves, not wait on the "victim" to designate a financially-connected third-party vendor to provide the data, thereby creating potential chain-of-custody issues that could hamper any actual prosecution.

And I don't know what "Clinton affiliated Crowdstrike" means.

Oh, I'm pretty sure you do, the same way everyone on the board does.

You're pathetic.

And you're a Trumpkin.

Otherwise, any administration, including Trump’s, could initiate an investigation for whatever cooked-up superficial reason it wanted.

WH Says DOJ IG Probe Expanding ‘Based On The Meeting With The President’

It was addressed. You fellas just don't approve of the answer.

As we've noted here before, the hallmark of all good conspiracy theories. You start looking for anything discrepant, and suddenly JFK is getting shot by 17 separate snipers simultaneously.

As we've noted here before, the hallmark of all good conspiracy theories.

Of course it took Emperor Fatbody multiple tries to spell “hereby” correctly because he’s an idiot. Like his base.

More than any other individuals, Bill and Hillary Clinton are responsible for creating the impression of inevitable corruption that Trump has exploited to get his supporters to shrug off his own corruption.

It's not true that everybody does it. But for years, the message from Clinton surrogates was that everybody does it and we should just get over it. Voters heard that message.

Wait until the (((Soros))) connection is revealed.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is denying that he has had conversations about trying to force out Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) with President Trump's budget director, Mick Mulvaney.

Stefan A. Halper, the FBI source who assisted the Russia investigation and is at the center of a standoff between congressional Republicans and the Justice Department, is a well-connected veteran of past GOP administrations who convened senior intelligence officials for seminars at the University of Cambridge in England....

Halper’s connections to the intelligence world have been present throughout his career and at Cambridge, where he ran an intelligence seminar that brought together past and present intelligence officials.

In 2014, Halper, along with Richard Dearlove, the former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, sponsored a session of the seminar that drew Michael Flynn, then director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who would go on to serve as Trump’s first national security adviser.

Halper taught international affairs and American studies at Cambridge from 2001 until 2015, when he stepped down with the honorary title of emeritus senior fellow of the Centre of International Studies, according to a spokesman for the university.

Since 2012, Halper has had contracts with the Defense Department, working for a Pentagon think tank called the Office of Net Assessment. According to federal records, ONA has paid Halper more than $1 million for research and development in the social sciences and humanities.

The funds did not go solely to Halper, who hired other academics and experts to conduct research and prepare reports, according to U.S. government officials.

“He thinks well. He writes critically. And he knows a lot of people whose insights he can tap for us as well,” one U.S. government official said.

Halper’s first wife was the daughter of the prominent former CIA analyst Ray S. Cline, who worked alongside President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and mentored Halper, introducing him to associates in the intelligence and political worlds, according to numerous people familiar with their relationship.

After earning his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1971, Halper quickly ascended, serving on the White House domestic policy council for President Richard M. Nixon and then in the Office of Management and Budget before being tapped as an assistant to President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff. According to a document from Ford’s presidential library, part of Halper’s job was assessing domestic political candidates, such as Jimmy Carter, for high-ranking staffers in the West Wing.

Halper later worked for Sen. William Roth (R-Del.) before joining the George H.W. Bush campaign in 1980 as national policy development director and then working for the Reagan-Bush campaign as national director of policy coordination. In the Reagan administration, he served as deputy assistant secretary of state for politico-military affairs, according to his biography.

After the 1980 race, Halper was caught up in a scandal concerning alleged political spying. Aides to Reagan, including Halper, were accused of having spied on Carter’s campaign and obtaining private documents that Carter was using to prepare for a debate. Some Reagan White House officials later alleged that Halper had used former CIA agents to run an operation against Carter. Halper called the reports at the time “absolutely false” and has long denied the accusations.

Between 2000 and 2001, Halper contributed more than $85,000 to George W. Bush’s first presidential bid and the Republican National Committee, according to campaign finance records. Most friends describe him as a moderate Republican who is hawkish on China and deeply committed to U.S. institutions, having worked for years inside and around the federal government.

Late in his career, Halper emerged as a vocal critic of President George W. Bush’s interventionist foreign policy. During classes at Cambridge, he often raised questions about Bush’s decisions and embraced a traditional Republican approach to foreign policy that emphasized long-standing Western alliances and limited foreign intervention, as witnessed by a Post reporter who studied under Halper in 2009. A book he co-wrote with Jonathan Clarke, “America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order,” was critical of the Bush administration’s approach to the Iraq War.

Halper has spent considerable time focused on China over the past decade, publishing “The Beijing Consensus: Legitimizing Authoritarianism in our Time” in 2010 that warned of China’s attempts to build an economic and industrial presence in Africa and elsewhere as a threat to global stability.

“Stef” — as Halper is called by people who know him — was also widely known at Cambridge as a gregarious gatherer of students and academics at his apartment in the city, along with his wife. He frequently hosted dinners with visiting students and scholars from around the world where — over wine and cheese from the local market — he would share colorful stories about his work for American presidents and the U.S. government and stir debates about the issues of the day.

Who is Stefan A. Halper, the FBI source who assisted the Russia investigation?

Apparently, some folks here think the Democrats October Surprise efforts don't count because they didn't work, and Hillary lost.

There are many moving pieces, thousands of details, and endless angles for attack. So Jason - and the rest of the GOP establishment - would rather attack the current investigation than put forth a theory of their own.

New and Hot: So dear reader, in addition to passing along his entire life story, let me know clue you into Halper's organic food preferences...

No, not actually. There are three investigations, and they keep attacking the oldest one, and sometimes the second one, and then triumphantly yelling “Aha!” about the current one.

(Specifically: Hillary’s server, the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign, and now Mueller’s investigation.)

zonk, why did you move to Canada?

My question has never been addressed. I still want you to lay out in broad terms how you think things went down. You know what this shadowy conspiracy you think is all about.

There is a reason for that, of course. It is because there is no coherent narrative that fits the known evidence. Well there is one, of course, but it happens to be some variant of "The Trump campaign found it self in bed with Russia and at best was used as their innocent patsy and at worst actively colluded with them along with a variety of crimes having been committed along the way by various parties."

it was really just a lot more air travel in a city that felt a lot like half a dozen other cities in eastern North America.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency is barring The Associated Press, CNN and the environmental-focused news organization E&E from a national summit on harmful water contaminants.

* * *

Guards barred an AP reporter from passing through a security checkpoint inside the building. When the reporter asked to speak to an EPA public-affairs person, the security guards grabbed the reporter by the shoulders and shoved her forcibly out of the EPA building.

Still anticipating DJT to go full-on Caligula and declare himself a god.

I'm glad that you had the experience. I hope you return and channel your energy and efforts to defeating Trump. Have you considered living In a red state where your vote and opinions might make a bigger difference?

I miss Chicago.

1. As someone who was part of diplomatic talks, this story on how Trump team screwed up China negotiations is a textbook case of nearly EVERY SINGLE THING you should NOT do. Bodes badly for North Korea summit.

Let’s pick it apart step by grueling step

2. Before the talks. Fail to prepare. Don’t have sufficient deliberations to come to a common negotiating position as a team. This is where you need an engaged POTUS to listen to the disagreements among the team & set guidance. Of course Trump won’t do that

3. During the talks. Because you failed to prepare have “profanity laced shouting matches” amongst yourselves in front of the Chinese encouraging them to exploit splits in the US team

4. Have the President publicly tweet sensitive concessions he plans to make causing a backlash in Congress that shuts down those options before they’ve even been offered or negotiated. now you’ve taken away your negotiating space

5. Also leak China’s concession to the press causing them to have to deny the concessions publicly and forcing the Chinese to & take a harder line. Now you’ve taken away your counterpart’s negotiating space

6. After the talks fail have various members of the team come out with different positions that publicly criticize the results of the negotiations and each other. Because that sends a good signal before the next negotiating round

7. Top it off with a front page NY Times story where clearly many of the US negotiators disparaged each other to the press. Because I’m sure they’ll now work really well as a team going forward.

8. Good luck with the North Korea summit. Glad we got rid of the JCPOA to negotiate a better deal. And of course we’ll get the ultimate deal on Israel-Palestine. God help us all

A late additional point. Diplomatic negotiations on tough issues are really really hard. Even without all these basic unforced errors, likelihood of success is often low. With these errors it’s impossible

Believe me when I say that despite the crime and higher taxes Chicago is a far better option than living in Kenosha/Racine. I guess the only way K/R beats Chicago is if you have kids and the northern Illinois suburbs are too pricey in which case you settle into a miserable existence while your kids go to school and then get the hell out of there once they go to college.

Maybe SBB didn't disappear after all.

Believe me when I say that despite the crime and higher taxes Chicago is a far better option than living in Kenosha/Racine. I guess the only way K/R beats Chicago is if you have kids and the northern Illinois suburbs are too pricey in which case you settle into a miserable existence while your kids go to school and then get the hell out of there once they go to college.

Maybe SBB didn't disappear after all.

Did he declare his exit or just ghost away?

I couldn't tell you what they would go for nowadays but back in the day you could buy an historic turn of the 20th century dirt cheap and even large tracts of lakefront property for dirt cheap in Racine. The homes would probably be dilapidated but they certainly had style. I lived in home that had parquet flooring that the founder of Johnson Wax installed before he went into the wax business. A bank would buy the flooring from my Uncle and install it in their bank in town. The backyard still had a carriage garage from back in the era before cars. The house needed to be gutted but it was dirt chip and I think he flipped it about 10 years later for a tidy profit and I'm sure that guy flipped again for a tidy profit 10 years later as well.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Tuesday pushed back against a conclusion reached by the intelligence community and the Senate Intelligence Committee — that Russia favored President Donald Trump in its influence campaign during the 2016 election.

Speaking to reporters at a House briefing on election security, Nielsen was asked about the 2017 intelligence community report that found Putin not only “ordered an influence campaign” aimed at the 2016 presidential election, but also that Putin had a “clear preference” for Trump in those meddling efforts. She claimed that she hadn’t seen the conclusion, which was made available to the public last year.

“I do not believe that I’ve seen that conclusion,” Nielsen told reporters. “That the specific intent was to help President Trump win. I’m not aware of that. But I do generally have no reason to doubt any intelligence assessment.”

Look fellas, I'm sure it's just an urban legend... but how about we not chance the whole 'say his name three times' thing.

Old and Busted: It's treason to even speculate Halper might have been the informant. TREASON!!!

Maybe SBB didn't disappear after all.

I was wondering where he's been. Did he declare his exit or just ghost away?

Back in 2015-16, Trump and his pals were pushing mostly pro-Russia policies and some related comments from him were positively cringeworthy. Team Hillary sought to take advantage of this seeming low-hanging fruit through its work with Fusion GPS. Whether Steele deliberately sexed up his dossier or merely got played by Russian intelligence remains unclear, although with each passing day the former appears more likely. What is nearly certain, however, is that the dossier is ####.

Either in tandem with Team Clinton or on its own, the Obama DoJ and the Bureau may have manufactured its own intel operation against the Trump campaign, and later relied on the dossier's contents to secure themselves a FISA warrant that had up until then eluded them. (IIRC, a judge had rejected their applications -- twice.)

After Trump won, both the outgoing administration, including their allies within the Bureau, teamed up with Team Clinton, to sabotage the incoming/new administration. Frankly, Yates' talk of the Logan Act is all the evidence one needs to know their intentions, but the leaks to Ignatius and CNN are further proof that these folks were playing dirty.

I'm looking forward to reading what's inside Horowitz's reports and learning more.

Who knows, maybe I'm wrong about much of this, but there are way too many coincidences for me to think that. And at this point, very little would surprise me going the other way, including yes, learning that there was tampering of the 302 used in the Flynn case.

Old and Busted: It's treason to even speculate Halper might have been the informant. TREASON!!!

New and Hot: So dear reader, in addition to passing along his entire life story, let me know clue you into Halper's organic food preferences..

By your own admission (#244), you "haven't been following it [the Halper story] too closely", so perhaps that's an excuse for the cluelessness. Before leaking every last detail about Halper that removed any and all doubt that he was the FBI informant who spied on the Trump campaign, the current or former FBI/DoJ sources were claiming that the informant was some kind of super-secret, covert undercover operative engaged in such sensitive matters that his life and other's would be endangered if his identity was disclosed, even to Congress. That was untrue. Halper had some association with the CIA, but not of that nature. He didn't overthrow foreign governments, just pontificated on the state of the world. You might ask why folks lied about that.

Guards barred an AP reporter from passing through a security checkpoint inside the building. When the reporter asked to speak to an EPA public-affairs person, the security guards grabbed the reporter by the shoulders and shoved her forcibly out of the EPA building.

By your own admission (#244), you "haven't been following it [the Halper story] too closely", so perhaps that's an excuse for the cluelessness. Before leaking every last detail about Halper that removed any and all doubt that he was the FBI informant who spied on the Trump campaign, the current or former FBI/DoJ sources were claiming that the informant was some kind of super-secret, covert undercover operative engaged in such sensitive matters that his life and other's would be endangered if his identity was disclosed, even to Congress. That was untrue. Halper had some association with the CIA, but not of that nature. He didn't overthrow foreign governments, just pontificated on the state of the world. You might ask why folks lied about that.

Obviously, you think that is dispositive. Others, not so much.

Just yesterday, I was looking at the photo of Beltran after the backward-K in the 2006 NLCS. In the background, we see Trump looking like a gold tie-wearing Zeus, ready to shove a lightning bolt up someone's ass.

So, what happened after the wide, bipartisan support for the Ginsburg & Breyer confirmations? Senate Democrats returned the favor by breaking with tradition and voting against John Roberts in large numbers (78-22 for the full Senate)

While aides have urged the president to swap out the Twitter phone on a monthly basis, Trump has resisted their entreaties, telling them it was “too inconvenient,” the same administration official said.

Authoritarians hate science. The Soviet Union prohibited discussion of Darwinian evolutionary theory in favor of Lysenkoism which was more consistent with their political worldview. Republicans do the same every opportunity they get, because their political philosophy eschews data and serious analysis. "Feels before reals," they might say, genuflecting to their fat, bald, spray-tanned anti-vaxxer leader.

(EDIT: You already know my view of the server investigation. It was tanked, pure and simple. And at the time Comey spoke to reporters on 5 July 2016, I expressed a modicum of sympathy for him, much like I had done after he claimed there was nothing to see here WRT the IRS scandal. Hillary was almost certainly going to win and this was not the hill to die on, especially someone with such a bright and wide self-preservation streak.)