- Nellie Ohr, the wife of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, told Congress in October that she investigated President Donald Trump’s children on behalf of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm behind the Steele dossier.
- Ohr also testified that during a meeting in July 2016, Christopher Steele passed her husband materials from his infamous dossier.
- Nellie Ohr, who worked as a contractor for Fusion GPS, looking into Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump’s business dealings and their travel.
The wife of a Justice Department official who worked for Fusion GPS during the 2016 campaign told Congress in 2018 that one of her tasks at the opposition research firm was to research President Donald Trump’s children, including their business activities and travel.
Nellie Ohr, a former contractor for Fusion GPS, also told lawmakers during an Oct. 19 deposition that she recalls that Christopher Steele gave her husband, Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, materials from the infamous anti-Trump dossier funded by Democrats.
Ohr said during the testimony that Steele, who like her was a contractor for Fusion GPS, hoped that her husband would pass the materials to the FBI.
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Conservative operative Roger Stone claims he never discussed impending releases of Wikileaks emails with President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller.
Stone was arraigned in a Washington D.C. court Tuesday afternoon on seven charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. Stone was indicted on seven counts Friday morning by Mueller’s team on charges of allegedly making false statements to Congress, tampering with a witness and obstructing a government investigation.
Stone’s house was raided by an FBI team serving a search warrant, a scene that Stone described in detail. He said he was awakened at the crack of dawn with dozens of armed FBI agents and vehicles surrounding his property. The conservative operative said he was particularly concerned for the well-being of his wife, who is hard of hearing and was terrified of the early morning raid.
Stone also detailed how he is receiving multiple death threats per day and that his family is being harassed at his residence in Florida.
The indictment against Stone claims that a “senior official” on Trump’s 2016 campaign asked Stone to inquire with Wikileaks about possible impending releases of damaging information on Hillary Clinton in July 2016. Stone told TheDC he is “unfamiliar” with the email referenced within Mueller’s indictment, but noted that perhaps it needed more context.
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Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker said Monday that special counsel Robert Mueller is nearing the end of his investigation.
“The investigation is, I think, close to being completed, and I hope that we can get the report from Director Mueller as soon as possible,” Whitaker said at a press conference to announce an indictment against Huawei, a Chinese telecom company.
Whitaker said that he had been “fully briefed on the investigation” being led by Mueller, a former FBI director.
Whitaker’s surprise remarks are the first confirmation from a government official that the investigation is nearing its end. Reports have suggested that Mueller was in the process of writing a final report. NBC News reported in December that Mueller planned to turn over a final report by mid-February.
Whitaker, who was appointed associate attorney general after Jeff Sessions was fired on Nov. 7, has come under fire from Democrats because of statements he made before joining the Justice Department criticizing the Russia probe. As the head of a conservative watchdog group, Whitaker questioned whether Mueller had the constitutional authority to investigate President Donald Trump for obstruction of justice for firing James Comey as FBI director.
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- Special counsel Robert Mueller indicted Trump confidant Roger Stone on Friday.
- The indictment highlights a growing rift between Stone and two former associates, Jerome Corsi and Randy Credico.
- Corsi and Credico have already indicated that they are willing to testify at any trial Stone may face. Stone has also pledged to fight the charges at trial.
The special counsel’s indictment of Roger Stone highlighted a deep rift that has grown during the Russia investigation between the longtime Trump confidant and two former associates he worked with during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Jerome Corsi and Randy Credico, who are referred to as “Person 1” and “Person 2” in the indictment, have indicated that they will testify against Stone at any trial that may occur. If that happens, the public can expect a dramatic affair. Stone has said that he plans to go to trial.
Stone was indicted Friday on charges that he lied to Congress about his interactions with Trump campaign officials, Corsi and Credico regarding WikiLeaks, the group that published emails hacked from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. He is also charged with witness tampering involving Credico and obstructing the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign.
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Roger Stone, a longtime confidant of President Donald Trump, was indicted Friday morning on charges in the special counsel’s investigation.
Prosecutors charged Stone, 69, with seven counts, including five for making false statements to Congress, one for witness tampering, and one for obstruction of a government proceeding.
He will appear in federal court Friday morning for his first hearing.
The charges center on Stone’s discussions with associates and Trump campaign officials about WikiLeaks, the group founded by Julian Assange that released Democrats’ emails during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The indictment accuses Stone of lying to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) during a Sept. 27, 2017 hearing about his discussions about WikiLeaks and Assange, neither of which are named in the indictment.
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Michael Cohen said Wednesday he is postponing congressional testimony scheduled for February due to what he claims are threats made against his family by President Donald Trump.
“Due to ongoing threats against his family from President Trump and Mr. Giuliani, as recently as this weekend, as well as Mr. Cohen’s continued cooperation with ongoing investigations, on the advice of counsel, Mr. Cohen’s appearance will be postponed to a later date,” Lanny Davis, a legal adviser for Cohen, said in a statement.
Cohen, a former personal attorney for Trump, was scheduled to appear before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Feb. 7 to testify about his work for his former boss.
Cohen is set to go to prison in March after receiving a three-year sentence on Dec. 12 for several crimes, including tax evasion, bank fraud, lying to Congress and making illegal campaign contributions.
Cohen pleaded guilty in the special counsel’s investigation to lying to Congress in 2017 about his efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. He pleaded guilty Aug. 21 in a case handled by federal prosecutors in Manhattan to the tax and bank charges. He also admitted to making hush payments to Stormy Daniels, a porn star who alleges she had an affair with Trump in 2006. Cohen has claimed Trump directed him to pay Daniels $130,000 in October 2016.
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- The FBI’s former general counsel acknowledged a series of “abnormal” and “unusual” steps that were taken during the early days of the bureau’s investigation into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia.
- James Baker told lawmakers in 2018 that during the 2016 campaign, a DNC lawyer provided him with information alleging a Russian bank had a back-channel communication system with Trump entities.
- Baker also said he reviewed an application for a surveillance warrant against Trump aide Carter Page, even though he rarely, if ever, handled warrant applications in other cases.
James Baker, the FBI’s former top lawyer, told Congress in 2018 about a series of “unusual” and “abnormal” steps he took in the early days of the bureau’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.
Baker told lawmakers during testimony Oct. 4 and Oct. 18, 2018, that even though he rarely handled applications for surveillance warrants against American citizens, he reviewed one the FBI was seeking against Carter Page, the former Trump campaign adviser.
Baker, who resigned from the FBI in May 2018, also said he had a meeting Sept. 19, 2016, with a lawyer working for the DNC. The meeting was unprecedented for Baker, who told lawmakers he could not recall ever having met with an outside counsel during his FBI tenure.
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A Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee is calling for an investigation of House Republicans he claims have colluded with the Trump White House to derail special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.
Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse did not cite evidence to back up his allegations. But speaking to the hosts of the “Skullduggery” podcast, the Democrat said that an investigation should be opened into whether President Donald Trump’s Republican allies sought to “impede and throw sticks into the spokes of the Mueller investigation.”
“It definitely needs to be investigated, in my view,” Whitehouse said on the podcast, which is hosted by Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff.
“Whether it amounts to criminal conduct or not, clearly the efforts of the House Republicans were designed to impede and throw sticks into the spokes of the Mueller investigation.”
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House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said Sunday he will “absolutely” investigate allegations made in a controversial BuzzFeed article even though the report has been directly disputed by the special counsel’s office.
“Absolutely. Absolutely,” Schiff told CBS’s “Face the Nation” when asked whether he would investigate allegations laid out in a BuzzFeed article published Thursday.
“Congress has a fundamental interest in two things. First, getting to the bottom of why this witness came before us and lied, and who else was knowledgeable that this was a lie,” the California Democrat added.
BuzzFeed reported former Trump attorney Michael Cohen told the special counsel’s office President Donald Trump instructed him to lie to Congress about his efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The website also reported documents and witness testimony would corroborate Cohen’s statements to prosecutors.
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Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen might back out of a congressional hearing scheduled for February, the former Trump lawyer’s adviser said Thursday.
In an appearance on MSNBC, Lanny Davis said Cohen is reconsidering whether to testify before Congress because of comments from President Donald Trump about Cohen’s father-in-law.
“There is genuine fear and it causes Michael Cohen to consider whether he should go forward or not. And he’s not yet made a final decision,” Davis told MSNBC’s Ari Melber.
Trump took aim at Cohen’s father-in-law during an interview Saturday with Fox’s Jeanine Pirro.
“[Cohen] should give information maybe on his father-in-law, because that’s the one that people want to look at,” Trump said.
“Because where does that money — that’s the money in the family. And I guess he didn’t want to talk about his father-in-law — he’s trying to get his sentence reduced.”
“So it’s pretty sad,” Trump continued. “It’s weak and it’s very sad to watch a thing like that.”
Trump’s remarks garnered an immediate rebuke from Democrats who accused the Republican of witness intimidation and tampering.
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When the annals of mistakes and abuses in the FBI’s Russia investigation are finally written, Bruce Ohr almost certainly will be the No. 1 witness, according to my sources.
The then-No. 4 Department of Justice (DOJ) official briefed both senior FBI and DOJ officials in summer 2016 about Christopher Steele’s Russia dossier, explicitly cautioning that the British intelligence operative’s work was opposition research connected to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and might be biased.
Ohr’s briefings, in July and August 2016, included the deputy director of the FBI, a top lawyer for then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and a Justice official who later would become the top deputy to special counsel Robert Mueller.
At the time, Ohr was the associate attorney general. Yet his warnings about political bias were pointedly omitted weeks later from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant that the FBI obtained from a federal court, granting it permission to spy on whether the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to hijack the 2016 presidential election.
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- The FBI ended its relationship with Trump-Russia dossier author Christopher Steele in late 2016, but the bureau kept taking information from him through DOJ official Bruce Ohr, Ohr revealed in congressional testimony.
- The FBI had renewed interest in connecting with Steele after President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, according to Ohr’s testimony.
- Steele was previously paid by both the FBI and the Democratic National Committee through Fusion GPS.
The FBI wanted to reestablish contact with Trump-Russia dossier author Christopher Steele days after President Donald Trump fired bureau Director James Comey, a top Department of Justice official revealed during a previously secret congressional testimony.
DOJ official Bruce Ohr laid out efforts to influence the DOJ by Christopher Steele, a former British spy being paid by the Democratic National Committee via the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. The FBI terminated Steele as a source in late 2016, reportedly for his contacts with the media, but he continued to funnel information to the bureau through Ohr.
On May 9, 2017, Trump fired Comey, which concerned FBI leaders. Comey has since been sharply critical of the president.
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President Donald Trump’s attorneys rejected a request from special counsel Robert Mueller in recent weeks for a sit-down interview with the Republican, according to CNN.
The request was made after Nov. 20, 2018, when Trump’s lawyers responded in writing to a list of questions from Mueller, who is investigating possible collusion with Russia as well as obstruction of justice.
Trump’s legal team and the special counsel have been at a standstill on the issue of an in-person interview for around five weeks, CNN reports.
“Mueller is not satisfied,” one source told the network.
It is unclear what the development means for the Mueller probe, which is widely considered to be in its final phase. Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for Trump on the Russia investigation, has said that an interview with Trump would occur “over my dead body.”
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- The FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether President Donald Trump was a Russian agent just days after he fired James Comey.
- But days after the FBI opened the probe, Peter Strzok, the bureau’s lead investigator on the Russia matter, expressed concern that “there’s no big there there” regarding the collusion investigation.
- Special counsel Robert Mueller took over the counterintelligence investigation.
A top FBI counterintelligence official expressed concern that there was “no big there there” in the Trump collusion investigation just days after the bureau formally opened an investigation into whether President Trump was acting as a foreign agent of Russia.
“You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely I’d be there no question. I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there’s no big there there,” Peter Strzok, who then served as deputy chief of FBI counterintelligence, wrote to FBI lawyer Lisa Page on May 18, 2017.
The text message took on new significance Friday after The New York Times reported that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation against Trump after the May 9, 2017 firing of James Comey as FBI director.
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The Supreme Court will consider the Trump administration’s request to intervene in the ongoing legal fight over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program Friday.
DACA is an Obama-era amnesty initiative that extends temporary legal status to 700,000 foreign nationals who arrived in the U.S. as children.
The Trump administration took steps to terminate DACA in September 2017. Those moves were immediately challenged in federal court. U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered the government to continue administering the program on Jan. 9, 2018. The Department of Justice broke with normal judicial procedure and asked the Supreme Court to overturn that decision, bypassing the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The high court rejected that petition in February 2018, but ordered the 9th Circuit to “proceed expeditiously” in its review of Alsup’s decision. After months passed without a ruling from the 9th Circuit, the Justice Department returned to the Supreme Court on Nov. 5, 2018, and again asked the justices to take their case. Three days later on Nov. 8, the 9th Circuit issued a decision upholding Alsup’s order.
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- The Steele dossier has remained a subject of intense intrigue and speculation since its publication two years ago on Thursday.
- Republicans claim that much of the salacious document has been debunked while Democrats defend the report as being accurate in its broad allegation that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.
- But the Trump-specific claims in the dossier remain unverified, with some of the claims having come under intense scrutiny.
- This analysis helps make sense of where the dossier stands now.
Two years after its controversial publication, the Steele dossier remains a subject of intense intrigue.
The 35-page report, authored by former British spy Christopher Steele and funded by Democrats, is best known for the vast conspiracy it alleges between the Trump campaign and Russian government during the run-up to the 2016 election. Its salacious claim that the Kremlin has blackmail material on President Donald Trump in the form of a sex tape has also captured public attention.
But even under two years of scrutiny and debate, the dossier remains unverified, at least as far as its core Trump-related allegations are concerned. None of its specific claims about collusion have been verified, and there is ample reason to believe that its main allegation on that front (an alleged trip to Prague by Michael Cohen) is inaccurate.
Nevertheless, Democrats and some pundits have defended the dossier, claiming that while specific allegations of collusion remain unanswered, Steele’s broader claims of Russian meddling have proved accurate.
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President Donald Trump urged Congress to pass a spending bill addressing immigration concerns on Tuesday night, citing the potential for violent crime and drug trafficking coming across the U.S.-Mexico border.
The president made his appeal for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border directly to the American people on Tuesday night, marking his first prime-time Oval Office address since taking office.
The president repeatedly referred to the situation at the border with illegal immigration as a “crisis.”
“America proudly welcomes millions of lawful immigrants who enrich our society and contribute to our nation. But all Americans are hurt by uncontrolled illegal migration,” Trump asserted.
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A group of top House Republicans is asking the Justice Department for details of an investigation into the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton and Trump-Russia probes that is being conducted by U.S. attorney John Huber.
In a letter sent Monday, the Republicans pressed Huber, the U.S. attorney for Utah, for details about witnesses and documents reviewed as part of the investigation.
Almost no details have emerged about Huber’s investigation since he was appointed in March 2018 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate the FBI’s handling of the politically-charged investigations of Clinton and Trump.
Sessions appointed Huber as a compromise to Republican pressure to appoint a special counsel to investigate the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign.
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In the near-decade I spent with the FBI training senior law enforcement officials around the world on how to combat corruption, there were always two key points I tried to impart. First, never stop with the low hanging fruit when addressing law enforcement corruption. Second, remember that the greatest indicator of systemic corruption within a government is when a country’s law enforcement is intentionally used as a political weapon.
Unfortunately, the FBI has work to do when it comes to both of these principles. In the year ahead, Director Christopher Wray should resolve to take back the bureau’s reputation.
FBI agents, particularly those who work public corruption investigations, are uniquely positioned to understand better than most that politics is a dishonest game of manipulation. Law enforcement should never allow itself to be lowered into that abyss. Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and others have cast a dark cloud over the FBI, making the line between politics and law enforcement nearly indistinguishable.
Before the FBI can move forward with their rehabilitation, it must take an honest inventory of the events leading to its public relations descent. First were the three blows of imprudence by James Comey. Within a single year, Comey assigned Andrew McCabe, the spouse of a then-recently failed candidate for Virginia state government, to the number two position in the FBI, charged with authority over public corruption investigations; gave an epoch-making press conference announcing the FBI would not pursue charges against Hillary Clinton; and told Congress days before the presidential election that the FBI was reviewing newly-acquired emails relevant to the Hillary Clinton investigation.
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The Trump administration’s battle against a global warming lawsuit brought by 21 youths will continue into 2019 after a federal court handed the government a big win over the holiday season.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Department of Justice (DOJ) in a Dec. 26 ruling largely missed by major media outlets. The court granted DOJ’s petition for interlocutory appeal that decreases the chances of the climate lawsuit going to trial anytime soon.
The three-judge Ninth Circuit panel is the very same one that in March 2018 ruled against Trump administration petitions for a writ of mandamus, which allows a higher court to overrule a lower court before a case is decided.
Environmentalists handling the case on behalf of youth activists immediately filed a petition asking the District Court of Oregon to restart trial proceedings in light of the appeals court ruling.
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The caucus of black New York state lawmakers runs a charity whose stated mission is to empower “African American and Latino youth through education and leadership initiatives” by “providing opportunity to higher education” — but it hasn’t given a single scholarship to needy youth in two years, according to a New York Post investigation.
The group collects money from companies like AT&T, the Real Estate Board of New York, Time Warner Cable and CableVision, telling them in promotional materials that they are “changing lives, one scholarship at a time.”
The group — called the Association of Black and Puerto Rican Legislators, Inc. — instead spent $500,000 in the 2015 – 2016 fiscal year on items like food, limousines and rap music, the Post found.
The politicians refused to divulge the charity’s 2017 tax filing to the Post despite federal requirements that charities do so upon request.
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White House aide Hogan Gidley called out a reporter for saying President Donald Trump was not working Monday amid the ninth day of the government shutdown, demanding he “correct the record.”
Gidley, Trump’s deputy press secretary, was responding to Playboy’s White House reporter Brian Karem, who tweeted out a photo of the West Wing, saying since there was no Marine present at the doorway, the president was not in the Oval Office. Gidley said he looked into the Oval Office right after seeing the tweet, and saw Trump sitting behind the Resolute Desk working, and said Karem did not even call the press team to ask if he was working before sending out the tweet.
This all comes as Trump has said he will not budge on the $5 billion requested for a border wall, one of his key campaign promises. Democrats refuse to accept Trump’s idea for a wall, with both House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer continuing to say there will be no wall built.
The two parties will now have to figure out an agreement, and the senators must be present for a vote on the Senate floor to send a bill to the president to sign and end the partial government shutdown.
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