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kpete

kpete's Journal
kpete's Journal
December 20, 2016

Comey and FBI had - NO PROBABLE CAUSE - to search Abedin's computer!!!

Comey Sent Letter Before Having a Warrant or Reading Content of Emails
http://schoenberg.com/Clinton/search%20warrant.pdf

The Subpoena That Rocked The Election Is Legal Garbage, Legal Experts Say
The warrant assumes that the mere existence of emails from or to Hillary Clinton is probable cause that a crime occurred.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-subpoena-that-rocked-the-election-is-legal-garbage-attorney-say_us_58597cd9e4b03904470b0633?nfwb6erkrmcth85mi




https://twitter.com/Amy_Siskind/status/811268873978867716?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/breaking-search-warrant-unsealed-that-was-used-to-obtain-clinton-emails-during-weiner-probe/


.....today the FBI released the search warrant (PDF) used to find irrelevant emails between Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton. There are three things of note in the search warrant:

The search warrant is nothing more than a rehash of Comey’s July press conference. You can hear the animosity of than Clinton Cash-reading agents who dreamed of indicting and perp walking Hillary Clinton but didn’t get to because of you know, laws, between the lines of the indictment.

James Comey issued his outrageous letter to Congress, which tipped the election to Donald Trump, on October 28th,

The Warrant was filed on October 30th.


This means that Comey issued his letter, which cast aspersions and judgments on Secretary Clinton, before he knew what was contained in the emails. This is remarkably unprofessional. Also, by pre-preemptively releasing a letter about a warrant which was filed under seal, Comey showed that he didn’t trust rogue agents to follow the law they swear to uphold and remain silent about items which are under seal.

http://schoenberg.com/Clinton/search%20warrant.pdf
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/12/20/1613049/-Incompetent-Partisan-Hack-James-Comey-Sent-Letter-Before-Having-a-Warrant

MORE:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/12/20/fbi-warrant-gives-little-new-light-clinton-emails-comey-letter/95651778/
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/documents-related-clinton-emails-unsealed-today/story?id=44303519
http://www.newsweek.com/lawyer-says-no-probable-cause-clinton-search-warrant-534400

And THIS!

https://twitter.com/Amy_Siskind/status/810535759157624832
https://www.facebook.com/amy.siskind/posts/10211222942594508


E. Randol Schoenberg
Follow · 2 hrs ·

I see nothing at all in the search warrant application that would give rise to probable cause, nothing that would make anyone suspect that there was anything on the laptop beyond what the FBI had already searched and determined not to be evidence of a crime, nothing to suggest that there would be anything other than routine correspondence between Secretary Clinton and her longtime aide Huma Abedin.

You will have to ask Judge Fox, or the agent in charge (whose name has been redacted), or Director Comey, why they thought they might find evidence of a crime, why they felt it necessary to inform Congress, and why they even sought this search warrant.

I am appalled.

You can view the search warrant at
http://schoenberg.com/Clinton/search%20warrant.pdf
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10154232284756270&set=a.37856836269.52112.718391269&type=3&theater




USA TODAY: Schoenberg said more information needs to be made public before the matter is put to rest. "The FBI agent’s name has not been disclosed, but I think that it may be appropriate to find out his/her name and determine what the motivations were,since it must have been obvious to the FBI that there was no real probable cause to believe they would find evidence of a crime," he said in a follow-up email. "It was very wrong for Director Comey to give that impression."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/12/20/fbi-warrant-gives-little-new-light-clinton-emails-comey-letter/95651778/


WAPO:
The FBI told a federal judge that it needed to search a computer to resume its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server because agents had found correspondence on the device between Clinton and top aide Huma Abedin — though they did not have any inkling what was being discussed, according to newly unsealed court documents.

The documents, made public Tuesday after a Los Angeles lawyer sued for their release, reinforce the impression that when the bureau revealed less than two weeks before the election that agents were again investigating Clinton, they had no new evidence of actual wrongdoing. The FBI’s revelation upended the presidential election, and to this day, Clinton and her supporters say it is at least partly to blame for her surprising loss to Donald Trump…

Brian Fallon, the Clinton campaign spokesman, said on Twitter there “was nothing in search warrant filing to controvert Comey’s statements from July and truly establish probable cause of a crime,” and that it was “salt in the wound to see FBI rationale was this flimsy.”

E. Randol Schoenberg, the lawyer who sued to have the warrant unsealed, said he saw “nothing at all in the search warrant application that would give rise to probable cause, nothing that would make anyone suspect that there was anything on the laptop beyond what the FBI had already searched and determined not to be evidence of a crime, nothing to suggest that there would be anything other than routine correspondence between Secretary Clinton and her longtime aide Huma Abedin.”

“I am appalled,” Schoenberg said.


https://www.balloon-juice.com/2016/12/20/nothingburgers-all-the-way-down/

TPM:
The following is from a former federal prosecutor with deep experience in public corruption investigations and prosecutions.

I've reviewed the redacted search warrant that the Court unsealed today.


It confirms what we assumed all along:
(1) prior to seeking the warrant and to Comey issuing his letter, the FBI had no idea whether these were new emails, or duplicates of emails they previously reviewed--all they could see was non-content header information (to and from);

(2) the FBI had no information to suggest that the emails were improperly withheld from them previously;

(3) the FBI had no facts to justify the urgency in seeking a review of the emails prior to the election. This latter point is key. Generally, DOJ policy commands that prosecutors and agents refrain from taking investigative steps (even non-public steps like seeking search warrants) within 60 days of an election in a politically sensitive matter.



http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/yep-comey-s-decision-was-just-as-bad-as-you-thought
December 20, 2016

Trumps Pick for Interior Secretary Was Caught in Pattern of Fraud at SEAL Team 6

.....when Zinke was a mid-career officer at SEAL Team 6, he was caught traveling multiple times to Montana in 1998 and 1999 to renovate his home. Zinke claimed that the travel was for official duties, according to the sources.

He submitted travel vouchers and was compensated for the travel costs.

Two SEAL officers investigated Zinke’s records and discovered a yearslong “pattern of travel fraud,” according to two of the sources. When confronted about the trips, Zinke acknowledged that he spent the time repairing and restoring a home in Whitefish, Montana, and visiting his mother, according to two retired SEAL Team 6 leaders. The future lawmaker eventually told SEAL leaders that the Montana house was where he intended to live after he retired from the Navy.

After Zinke was caught and warned, he continued to travel home and submit the expenses to the Navy. The offense would normally have been serious enough to have ended Zinke’s career, but senior officers at SEAL Team 6 did not formally punish him. Zinke could have been referred for criminal charges, or subjected to a nonjudicial proceeding that would have censured him, likely removing him from the unit. Neither of those things happened, and he was allowed to finish his assignment at the elite unit.

While he received no formal punishment, he was told he would not be allowed to return to the elite unit for future assignments, according to the sources. Zinke continued his career, and he was eventually promoted to Navy commander, the rank he retired at in 2008.


MORE:
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/20/trumps-pick-for-interior-secretary-was-caught-in-pattern-of-fraud-at-seal-team-6/

December 20, 2016

Goldman Sachs accounts for a quarter of Dow Jones gains since election

The Dow had gained over 1700 points in value since Election Day, up roughly 9.3 percent in a little over a month of trading. At the same time, Goldman Sachs has seen its stock value climb by over 33 percent.
When calculated out, that company’s stock spike accounts for about 24 percent of all the headline-grabbing gains seen in the Dow since Trump was elected.

The investment firm has seen its value skyrocket, along with several other corporations, as investors believe Trump’s election, coupled with a GOP Congress, could bode well for corporate profits going forward.

At the same time, Goldman has outpaced effectively every other stock on the market since Trump’s election.

The rally comes as Trump has made a number of Goldman alums close members of his inner circle.


http://thehill.com/policy/finance/311169-goldman-sachs-good-for-a-quarter-of-dows-trump-rally

December 20, 2016

How Republics End



What's about to happen here is populist style, with a heavy racist component, wedded to oligarch-friendly, middle-class-destroying policy


https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/810843844132696065
https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/810845594617049088
December 20, 2016

What Those Who Studied Nazis Can Teach Us About The Strange Reaction To Donald Trump



While it’s important to watch the president-elect closely, we also must be mindful of our own response to him.
12/19/2016 07:13 pm ET

………………..

These reactions to Trump and his supporters have a way of separating ideas that usually move in tandem. Facts and truth are suddenly unrelated. Power no longer implies responsibility. Legitimacy and decency are now somehow passengers on separate ships. In this dynamic, People magazine can champion both the perpetrator and the victim and see no contradiction or betrayal. Lilla can use the victory of a campaign steeped in identity politics to highlight the ineffectiveness of identity politics. And Lerner can argue that a campaign “advanced” by sexism, racism and xenophobia can tell us much about the targets of that bigotry, i.e. that they need to behave differently, but little about the supporters of that campaign.

So, why the rush to defend Trump’s supporters? Why the self-recriminations? Why the willingness to stretch the bounds of legitimacy to accommodate Trump’s antics? Much has been written about Trump’s demagoguery and its similarity to totalitarian leaders of the past, but what about Trump’s opponents? Are many of us borrowing a page from totalitarianism without realizing it? Are we empowering him? Are we coordinating?

The word Gleichschaltung is often translated from the German as “coordination” and refers to the process of ― politically speaking ― getting in line. It often appears in books about the Nazi era. German Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer and German journalist Joachim Fest wrote about the personal cost of coordinating in their respective memoirs. German author Sebastian Haffner and Americans including journalist William Shirer wrote about the propaganda and politics of coordination.

German-born Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, in one of her last interviews, explains it best.

“The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did. Friends ‘coordinated’ or got in line.” And this coordination was not necessarily due to the “pressure of terror,” said Arendt, who escaped Germany in 1933. Intellectuals were particularly vulnerable to this wave of coordination. “The essence of being an intellectual is that one fabricates ideas about everything,” and many intellectuals of her time were “trapped by their own ideas.”


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-nazi-propaganda-coordinate_us_58583b6fe4b08debb78a7d5c
December 20, 2016

Mobile official apologizes for Christmas tree at Trump rally removed from public park



The chief of staff to Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson issued a public apology Sunday for his responsibility in having a cedar tree cut down at Public Safety Memorial Park Friday and transported to Ladd-Peebles Stadium as a prop during President-elect Donald Trump's rally on Saturday.

Colby Cooper, who has been Stimpson's chief of staff since 2013, said he became "overzealous" in making sure "every detail was covered and the expectations" of Trump's team were exceeded ahead of Saturday's televised rally.

"I now know that there are citizens who are upset and offended that a tree from a city park was used as part of the decorations for the event," Cooper said in a statement sent out to the local media. "I accept full responsibility for having this done. For this, I sincerely apologize. Going forward, I will be more sensitive to the spectrum of concerns regarding trees."

Cooper had been charged with working with Trump's advance team last week in preparation for the rally, which was the final one during Trump's post-election "Thank You" tour. The president-elect spoke more than an hour before a large crowd at Ladd-Peebles Stadium and the large tree decorated with Christmas ornaments served as a back drop, blocking the stadium's scoreboard.


http://www.al.com/news/mobile/index.ssf/2016/12/mobile_chief_of_staff_apologiz.html
December 20, 2016

Donald Trump Can't Get Anyone to Perform at His Inauguration, Idina Menzel Suggests He Sings Himself

“I think it’s karma, baby,” the voice of Elsa from Frozen told Vanity Fair. “I mean, look: All the artists in the world got up and tried to get our girl (Hillary Clinton) elected, and it still didn’t happen, so we’re all still trying to recover from that.”

Idina suggested that if Melania’s husband couldn’t find anyone to sing at his little party, that maybe he might do it himself?

“Maybe he’ll just have to sing something himself. He probably thinks he has a great voice; he thinks he does everything great.”

Hell yes
http://sandalwoodandsunlight.tumblr.com/post/154686647213/donald-trump-cant-get-anyone-to-perform-at-his

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