- Former Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr told Congress in October that she “favored” Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election.
- A transcript of Ohr’s testimony was published Thursday.
- Nellie Ohr, whose husband is DOJ official Bruce Ohr, detailed her work for Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the Steele dossier.
- Nellie Ohr said that a Ukrainian lawmaker was one of Fusion GPS’s sources.
Nellie Ohr, a former Fusion GPS contractor and wife to Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, told Congress that she “favored” Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign, and would not have researched the Democrat as she did Donald Trump.
“I would probably have been less comfortable doing opposition research that would have gone against Hillary Clinton,” Nellie Ohr told a congressional task force on Oct. 19, according to a transcript released Thursday.
“And why is that?” a congressional staffer asked Nellie Ohr.
“Because I favored Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate,” said Nellie Ohr.
She gave research she did on Trump and his associates to her husband, Bruce Ohr, in hopes that he would provide it to the FBI.
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Fox News has continued to dominate cable news ratings in the aftermath of the Mueller investigation’s conclusion.
Special Report with Bret Baier averaged 2.3 million viewers in total with 364,000 in the key age demographic of 25-54, according to Nielsen Media Group. MSNBC’s breaking coverage of the end of the Mueller probe garnered 1.7 million viewers and nearly a quarter-of-a-million in the key demo, whereas CNN only managed to attract 1 million viewers, but did have 291,000 in the age bracket.
Each network altered their coverage for the release of the report.
From 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. that night, Fox News averaged 2.5 million viewers, whereas MSNBC had 2 million and CNN had under 1 million.
Further, MSNBC star primetime host Rachel Maddow lost 500,000 viewers from last Monday to this Monday, when she had 2.5 million. Her ratings took an additional hit Tuesday, losing 200,000 more viewers. Her show still produced the best ratings on her network and significantly beat out CNN, who had less than 1 million viewers for each primetime show.
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Peters speculated that President Donald Trump has acted as an agent of Russia, which is one of the core claims of the Democrat-funded dossier. Peters repeated the familiar argument that Trump will not publicly criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin to make his case.
“He won’t criticize Putin, and why doesn’t he want sanctions? Why has he been slow rolling sanctions? Why does he just dove tail with Putin’s view of the world?” said Peters.
“Anderson, I may be utterly wrong,” he continued. “I may be influenced by my background as an intelligence officer but again, I go back to what has been not addressed: The Steele dossier. Given Trump’s behavioral profile, he was a perfect target and if you want various explanations, the Steele dossier is a viable one.”
Peters’ view of the dossier would seem to be out of whack with Mueller’s conclusions from the Russia probe. That’s because Mueller said in a report provided to the Justice Department on Friday that prosecutors found no evidence of conspiracy or collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
“The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” Mueller said.
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Special counsel Robert Mueller has finally released the report that was two years in the making, which found that President Donald Trump did not “conspire” with the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election.
However, the report did not come to any conclusions on whether or not Trump “obstructed justice,” leaving it to Attorney General William Barr to decide.
Barr released a four-page summary of the report Sunday, which included a statement from Mueller that “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Trump and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders have said that the president has, in fact, been “exonerated” because the attorney general announced there was a lack of evidence to convict him of a “crime”.
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Democratic California Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday that there is compelling evidence that President Donald Trump colluded with Russian interests during the 2016 presidential election.
The accusation comes as special counsel Robert Mueller concluded his investigation without charging any U.S. citizen with a collusion-related crime, though six Trump associates were charged for unrelated criminal offenses.
“There’s a difference between compelling evidence of collusion and whether the special counsel concludes that he can prove beyond a reasonable doubt the criminal charge of conspiracy,” Schiff told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
“I have trust in [Mueller’s] prosecutorial judgment,” Schiff added. “But that doesn’t mean, of course, that there isn’t compelling and incriminating evidence that should be shared with the American people.”
Schiff listed several episodes as substantiating the collusion charge, including the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between campaign officials and a Kremlin-aligned lawyer, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s post-election conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and erstwhile Trump confidant Roger Stone’s communications with WikiLeaks.
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The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is a “highly profitable scam” that “never lived up to the values it espoused,” according to former SPLC staffer Bob Moser.
New York Magazine on Thursday published a scathing essay from Moser, now a Rolling Stone reporter, accusing the left-wing non-profit of “ripping off donors” while turning a blind eye to sexual harassment and racial discrimination within its own ranks.
The SPLC fired co-founder Morris Dees on March 13 over unspecified conduct issues.
The SPLC announced Dees’ firing after roughly two dozen SPLC employees previously signed a letter to the organization’s leadership expressing their alarm at “allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism,” The Los Angeles Times reported.
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Trump ramped up his attacks on McCain in the wake of court documents that revealed details about the Republican lawmaker’s handling of the dossier, which was authored by former British spy Christopher Steele. Trump’s comments have drawn rebuke from some Republicans, including Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson, who called the remarks “deplorable.”
McCain and an associate, David Kramer, were first told about Steele’s report Nov. 18, 2016. At McCain’s direction, Kramer to travel to London to meet with Steele, a former MI6 officer.
Kramer obtained a copy of the report and provided it to McCain. McCain met with Comey at FBI headquarters Dec. 9, 2016. He long claimed he had no idea whether the allegations in the dossier were accurate, but he said the FBI should investigate. Unknown to McCain at the time, the FBI had already obtained Steele’s report through several other channels.
Kramer, a former State Department official, speculated in a Dec. 13, 2017, deposition that Steele and Fusion GPS chose McCain so a Republican, rather than a Democrat, could present the dossier to Comey.
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Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara said during a Tuesday interview with MSNBC’s Ari Melber that he considered secretly recording a phone call with President Donald Trump back in 2017.
“While there are critiques of Donald Trump that allege that he is not that informed or not that good at this, your concern was that he might be very informed and trying to cultivate you or involve you in something that you viewed as potentially improper,” Melber stated.
Bharara, who was famously fired by Trump after refusing to resign, answered, “Yeah. I have come to that conclusion over time in the months since. But, in that moment we actually considered, and it sounds not as crazy as it did back then because now we know about Michael Cohen recording the president and Omarosa recording the president.”
“You considered what?” the host followed up.
“Taping the president in that phone call,” Bharara responded. “Yeah, because I wanted to make sure because I had a certain amount of mistrust — it was an odd phone call to be making. It would be my word against his, if he decides to say something inappropriate, which I didn’t necessarily know was going to happen.”
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A Justice Department official who worked on former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s case is leaving the special counsel’s office, a spokesman for Robert Mueller said Monday.
“Zainab Ahmad has concluded her detail with the Special Counsel’s Office but will continue to represent the office on specific pending matters that were assigned to her during her detail,” special counsel spokesman Peter Carr said in a statement, first reported by Yahoo! News.
Ahmad’s departure is the latest signal that Mueller’s probe is nearing its end. Carr confirmed Thursday that Andrew Weissmann, the high-profile Mueller prosecutor who handled cases against Paul Manafort, is planning to leave the team.
Ahmad, a counterterrorism prosecutor, is one of the Mueller team members to sign Flynn’s guilty plea for lying to the FBI regarding his contacts with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Flynn has cooperated with several investigations as part of his plea agreement. He is expected to testify later in 2019 in a trial against his former business partner, Bijan Kian. Kian was indicted on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent of Turkey.
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President Donald Trump tweeted Sunday that Fox News host Shepard Smith should be working at CNN along with two of the network’s weekend anchors, Arthel Neville and Leland Vittert.
He also wondered if the two weekenders were “trained by CNN” before the network’s “ratings collapse.”
“Were @FoxNews weekend anchors, @ArthelNeville and @LelandVittert, trained by CNN prior to their ratings collapse?” Trump tweeted. “In any event, that’s where they should be working, along with their lowest rated anchor, Shepard Smith!”
While the president’s reason for criticizing Neville and Vittert was unclear, Shepard Smith has long drawn the ire of conservative Fox News viewers. Last year, the anchor finished dead last by a mile in a Daily Caller poll of favorite Fox News anchors.
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- David Kramer, a former State Department official, revealed in a court deposition that he had contact with a dozen reporters regarding the infamous Steele dossier.
- Kramer, a longtime associate of John McCain, was BuzzFeed’s source for the dossier, which alleges a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Kremlin.
- Kramer provided the dossier to CNN’s Carl Bernstein, as well as to several government officials, including Obama National Security Council official Celeste Wallander and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger.
An associate of late Arizona Sen. John McCain described in detail his contacts with a dozen journalists and several government officials regarding the infamous Steele dossier, according to a transcript of a court deposition unsealed Thursday.
David Kramer, a former State Department official, said in a deposition on Dec. 13, 2017 that he provided a copy of Christopher Steele’s dossier to reporters from McClatchy, NPR, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed and CNN’s Carl Bernstein.
He also shared the report with State Department official Victoria Nuland, Obama National Security Counsel official Celeste Wallander and Illinois GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger.
Kramer’s deposition sheds new light on the campaign by Steele and his employer, Fusion GPS, to disseminate the dossier to the press and government officials.
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- A former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer who has worked with Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele quietly formed a pro-democracy nonprofit group in 2018 called Advance Democracy Inc.
- A Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found that a multi-billion dollar charity backed by Silicon Valley tech titans donated $500,000 to the group last year.
- The staffer operates a similar charity called The Democracy Integrity Project, which receives funding from George Soros. He allegedly told one associate that the group operates as a “shadow media organization” that works with the U.S. government.
A Silicon Valley charity gave $500,000 to a nonprofit group founded by a former Senate staffer who is working with Fusion GPS and Trump dossier author Christopher Steele.
The Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF), which has received significant funding from tech industry billionaires, gave the donation in 2018 to Advance Democracy Inc., a Virginia-based 501(c)(3) group, according to a database the recipient group runs.
A Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found that Advance Democracy shares the same address as The Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP), another nonprofit group started by a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer for California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Daniel Jones.
Mystery surrounds both of Jones’s operations. The identities of both groups’ donors have largely been kept secret, as Jones has avoided revealing his backers.
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Republican Georgia Rep. Doug Collins released the private testimony of former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, but it’s former Attorney General Loretta Lynch who may feel the sting.
According to Page’s testimony, which was made public on Tuesday, the FBI considered charging former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with gross negligence under 18 U.S. Code § 793 for her alleged handling of classified information.
“We had multiple conversations with the Justice Department about bringing a gross negligence charge,” Page told Republican Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe. “And that’s, as I said, the advice that we got from the Department was that they did not think — that it was constitutionally vague and not sustainable.”
Ratcliffe responded, “When you say advice you got from the Department, you’re making it sound like it was the Department that told you: ‘You’re not going to charge gross negligence because we’re the prosecutors and we’re telling you we’re not going to.'”
“That’s correct,” Page answered.
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- Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley claimed that special counsel Robert Mueller quoted selectively from Trump campaign emails in court filings in the case against George Papadopoulos.
- In a “statement of offense” in the Papadopoulos case, Mueller suggested the Trump campaign wanted a “low-level” campaign staffer to meet with Russian government officials.
- Grassley claims other campaign emails provide additional context showing that the Trump team wanted a campaign aide merely to reject offers to meet with Russians.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley pressed special counsel Robert Mueller regarding the “selective use” of emails in court filings in the case against former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.
In a letter sent Friday to Attorney General William Barr, Grassley referred to a letter he sent Mueller on Nov. 16, 2017, two weeks after prosecutors revealed that Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
Grassley said that prosecutors’ “statement of offense” against Papadopoulos quoted selectively from campaign emails in a way that suggested the Trump campaign wanted a low-level staffer to meet with Russians.
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- A dark money group based in California contributed $2 million to The Democracy Integrity Project, the organization that has contracted with Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to investigate President Donald Trump.
- The Democracy Integrity Project’s founder, a former staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has acknowledged to the FBI that the group provides information to the press, lawmakers and investigators.
- Fund for a Better Future is the second Democracy Integrity Project donor to have been identified. George Soros gave $1 million to the group.
A dark money group with links to several high-profile liberal activists contributed $2 million to The Democracy Integrity Project, an organization founded by a former Dianne Feinstein staffer that has contracted with Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to investigate President Donald Trump.
Fund for a Better Future (FBF) donated $2,065,000 to The Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP) in 2017, according to IRS filings reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
TDIP was founded on Jan. 31, 2017, by Daniel Jones, a consultant who worked for Feinstein, a California Democrat, when she controlled the Senate Intelligence Committee. Jones has disclosed to the FBI that he hired Fusion GPS and Steele, the author of the anti-Trump dossier, to continue an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
He also told an associate that TDIP operated as a “shadow media organization helping the government.” Jones suggested to the associate, Adam Waldman, that his TDIP team planted several anti-Trump articles.
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A federal judge in Virginia sentenced Paul Manafort to 47 months in prison Thursday on tax and bank fraud charges, a term much lighter than the sentence the former Trump campaign chairman faced under federal sentencing guidelines.
U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III said guidelines calling for 19 to 24.5 years in prison for Manafort were “excessive.”
Manafort, 69, said in remarks before the sentence was handed down that his life is in “shambles.” He will be sentenced later in March in a separate case in Washington, D.C., where the judge in that case, Amy Berman Jackson, will determine if Manafort can serve a sentence in that case concurrently with his Virginia sentence.
Manafort was convicted on eight fraud-related charges Aug. 21, 2018. He pleaded guilty Sept. 14 to conspiracy charges related to his consulting work for the Ukrainian government.
Manafort worked as a press relations guru from 2004 through 2014 for Viktor Yanukovych, who served as Ukraine’s president from Feb. 25, 2010, to Feb. 22, 2014.
None of the charges against Manafort involved allegations of collusion with the Russian government, as Ellis noted during Thursday’s hearing.
“He is not before the court for anything having to do with colluding with the Russian government,” Ellis said.
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A lawyer for Michael Cohen says that the former Trump fixer directed his former attorney to inquire about a presidential pardon, a claim which, if true, would contradict Cohen’s congressional testimony on Feb. 27.
Lanny Davis told The Wall Street Journal Wednesday night that Cohen instructed Stephen Ryan, his previous lawyer, to raise the prospect of a pardon shortly after the FBI raided Cohen’s home in April 2018.
“During that time period, [Cohen] directed his attorney to explore possibilities of a pardon at one point with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani as well as other lawyers advising President Trump,” Davis told The Journal.
That statement directly contradicts what Cohen told the House Oversight and Reform Committee in public testimony on Feb. 27.
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New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denied violating campaign finance laws Tuesday in response to a Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint alleging she and her chief of staff set up a million-dollar private slush fund.
“There is no violation,” Ocasio-Cortez told Fox News.
The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), a conservative government watchdog, accused Ocasio-Cortez and Saikat Chakrabarti, her chief of staff, of illegally funneling money between political action committees (PACs) and private companies that were both controlled by Chakrabarti.
The NLPC claims that the transfers from the PACs to the LLCs were part of an “extensive” plan to avoid reporting campaign expenditures to the FEC.
Fox also asked Ocasio-Cortez if she is connected to “dark money,” to which she replied, “No, no.”
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- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a top aide appear to control an outside PAC credited with being the central force behind her June 2018 primary victory.
- One former Federal Election Commission member thinks there would be a “serious investigation” if a complaint were filed, noting that the probe could potentially result in civil penalties or even jail time for Ocasio-Cortez and her chief of staff.
- A second former commissioner said there were possibly “multiple violations of federal campaign finance law.”
- Justice Democrats ran campaigns for Ocasio-Cortez and 11 other Democrats, but the New York Democrat was the only one to win her general election.
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti obtained majority control of Justice Democrats PAC in December 2017, according to archived copies of the group’s website, and the two appear to retain their control of the group, according to corporate filings obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. If the Federal Election Commission (FEC) finds that the New York Democrat’s campaign operated in affiliation with the PAC, which had raised more than $1.8 million before her June 2018 primary, it would open them up to “massive reporting violations, probably at least some illegal contribution violations exceeding the lawful limits,” former FEC commissioner Brad Smith said.
Ocasio-Cortez never disclosed to the FEC that she and Chakrabarti, who served as her campaign chair, controlled the PAC while it was simultaneously supporting her primary campaign, and former FEC commissioners say the arrangement could lead to multiple campaign finance violations. The group backed 12 Democrats during the 2018 midterms, but Ocasio-Cortez was the only one of those to win her general election.
“If the facts as alleged are true, and a candidate had control over a PAC that was working to get that candidate elected, then that candidate is potentially in very big trouble and may have engaged in multiple violations of federal campaign finance law, including receiving excessive contributions,” former Republican FEC commissioner Hans von Spakovsky told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
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- Andrew McCabe claimed in a recent interview that the FBI’s applications for surveillance warrants against Carter Page were “adequate.”
- McCabe also discussed the FBI’s use of an informant used to make contact with several Trump campaign advisers, including Page and George Papadopoulos.
- Republicans have dubbed the Page surveillance warrants and use of the informant, Stefan Halper, “Spygate.”
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is defending the FBI’s reliance on the Steele dossier as well as the bureau’s use of a confidential informant to make contact with the Trump campaign as part of an investigation into possible collusion with Russia.
In an interview as part of a recent book tour, McCabe disputed Republicans’ claims that the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court about aspects of the dossier in applications warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
And in his book, “The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” McCabe defended the use of an informant who appears to be Stefan Halper, a longtime FBI and CIA informant who cozied up to Page and two other Trump advisers, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos, during the 2016 campaign.
“I do believe that we adequately notified the FISA Court of the information we were using, and what we thought of the information,” McCabe told New York Times reporter Adam Goldman in an interview that aired on C-SPAN on Saturday.
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