More Bogus Intelligence Used by the ‘Deep State’

America is now aware of the disturbing way Obama-era intelligence agencies ignored protocol and used the Steele dossier as a pretext to spy on American citizens in an opposing campaign. It will likely go down as the greatest scandal ever in American politics. In a May 2019 interview with cbs News, United States Attorney General William Barr said that if true, the entire act is “unprecedented” and is “a serious red line that’s been crossed.”

But the shocking and unconstitutional misuse of the Steele dossier may only be the tip of the iceberg.

New reporting by journalist John Solomon suggests that the Steele dossier was not the only “intelligence” in the Trump-Russia collusion hoax that was abused by the fbi in order to justify spying on members of the Trump campaign. The other document that received the Steele dossier-treatment by the fbi is known as Paul Manafort’s “black cash ledger.”

Manafort has a long history in U.S. politics. He has worked for and advised Republican campaigns since the mid-1970s. He also committed serious financial crimes in Ukraine during the mid-2000s. He was investigated by the Obama administration but never prosecuted, and the investigation ended in 2014. It was during this investigation that the Manafort “black cash ledger” came to the attention of the Obama Department of Justice. Curiously, Manafort was not prosecuted for it or any crimes associated with it.

Andrew McCarthy believes the Obama administration decided not to prosecute Manafort because it would have meant investigating other U.S. officials involved in Ukraine at the time, including then Vice President Joe Biden, his son and then Obama White House counsel Greg Craig (Craig has since been indicted for his dealings in Ukraine).

Two years later, in 2016, Manafort began working for the Trump campaign, where he briefly served as campaign manager. Undoubtedly, this got the attention of the Obama administration and put a target on his back. There was now an avenue for the Obama administration not to warn the Trump campaign about Manafort, but to use him as an excuse to spy on the campaign. All the Obama doj needed was a pretext to reopen the investigation into Manafort.

That was why we suddenly saw the Manafort cash ledger leaked to the media and make national headlines.

The ledger showed that Paul Manafort received illegal cash payments from Ukrainian officials and moved that cash across borders. It showed Manafort’s dealings with former Ukrainian leader Victor Yanukovich, a close ally of Vladimir Putin. This formed a huge part of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. The media had a field day with the ledger. This is what eventually led to Mr. Trump phasing out Manafort from the campaign.

In turns out the ledger was likely a fake from the beginning—and Obama’s fbi was warned about it, too.

John Solomon is one of the few journalists concerned about investigating what was happening at the Department of Justice during the end of the Obama administration and beginning of the Trump administration. He wrote for the Hill that the fbi’s use of the Manafort “black ledger” is deeply disturbing.

In search warrant affidavits, the fbi portrayed the ledger as one reason it resurrected a criminal case against Manafort that was dropped in 2014 and needed search warrants in 2017 for bank records to prove he worked for the Russian-backed Party of Regions in Ukraine.

There’s just one problem: The fbi’s public reliance on the ledger came months after the feds were warned repeatedly that the document couldn’t be trusted and likely was a fake, according to documents and more than a dozen interviews with knowledgeable sources.

Ukrainian authorities warned that the ledger was a fraud and could not be authenticated. The document is still being investigated in Ukraine. Other sources say the ledger is unusual because Manafort dealt in wire transfers and that the dates of many of the transactions don’t line up with other records. The ledger was used as probable cause for reopening the Manafort investigation, but Manafort hasn’t been indicted for any of the supposed crimes outlined in the ledger because prosecutors know the ledger would not hold up in court.

To top it off, the fbi and Mueller’s special counsel were warned that the “black ledger” was likely a fake—but they still used it as the predicate for reopening the investigation into Manafort. Instead of using the ledger itself, investigators and prosecutors relied on media reports about the ledger as probable cause to reopen the investigation.

Solomon wrote:

But with Manafort, the fbi and Mueller’s office did not cite the actual ledger—which would require agents to discuss their assessment of the evidence—and instead cited media reports about it. The feds assisted on one of those stories as sources.

For example, agents mentioned the ledger in an affidavit supporting a July 2017 search warrant for Manafort’s house, citing it as one of the reasons the fbi resurrected the criminal case against Manafort.

See the trend? It starts with a fake report. The fbi knows it can’t verify the report and can’t justify an investigation without evidence. Then the report gets dropped into the media spin cycle. Now the fbi cites multiple “independent” sources as probable cause rather than the one unverified report.

In a July 25, 2017, affidavit, an fbi agent stated: “On Aug. 19, 2016, after public reports regarding connections between Manafort, Ukraine and Russia—including an alleged ‘black ledger’ of off-the-book payments from the Party of Regions to Manafort—Manafort left his post as chairman of the Trump campaign.”

The fbi continued to cite “public reports” about Manafort’s bank records. Those reports reference the unverified “black ledger.” It was secondhand sourcing built on fake news—just like the Steele dossier.

Solomon said it got worse: “Three months later, the fbi went further in arguing probable cause for a search warrant for Manafort’s bank records, citing a specific article about the ledger as evidence Manafort was paid to perform U.S. lobbying work for the Ukrainians.”

In some instances, the fbi may have played a direct role in getting those articles published. In a footnote on one affidavit, an fbi agent referenced an April 12, 2017, Associated Press article about the Manafort ledger. Here is what Solomon wrote about the curious circumstances surrounding the use of that article in the affidavit:

[T]he agent failed to disclose that both fbi officials and Department of Justice (doj) prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who later became Mueller’s deputy, met with those AP reporters one day before the story was published and assisted their reporting.

An fbi record of the April 11, 2017, meeting declared that the AP reporters “were advised that they appeared to have a good understanding of Manafort’s business dealings” in Ukraine.

So, essentially, the fbi cited a leak that the government had facilitated and then used it to support the black ledger evidence, even though it had been clearly warned about the document.

The fbi met with reporters, helped direct their articles, likely leaking information to them that it had received as unverified information. When the articles were published, the fbi used them as “independent” reporting to verify the gossip and reopen the investigation.

At one time the mainstream media would help expose this sort of government wrongdoing. Now the media is complicit. That is a big reason why more of this isn’t being exposed. William Barr said in that May cbs interview, “The fact that today people just seem to brush aside the idea that it is OK … to engage in these activities against a political campaign is stunning to me especially when the media doesn’t seem to think that it’s worth looking into. They’re supposed to be the watchdogs of … our civil liberties.”

The Obama administration didn’t prosecute Manafort’s crimes because it was involved in the same crimes! But as soon as Manafort joined the Trump campaign, it was a new ballgame. By fabricating a pretext for reopening the investigation into Manafort, Obama’s intelligence agencies could spy on the Trump campaign. Manafort was just one of many Americans in the Trump campaign to be targeted this way.

America has the most powerful surveillance and investigative agencies in the world. Look what happens when the agents there begin to abuse that power and disregard protocols to serve what they believe is the greater good, rather than applying the rule of law equally.

The way the Obama Department of Justice operated was completely lawless. It overlooked Manafort’s crimes in order to avoid investigating members of the Obama White House who were also committing crimes. Two years later, when Manafort went to work for the Trump campaign, the Obama administration leaked a ledger, known to be fake and created during the 2014 investigation, to the media to revive the investigation. Once the Manafort investigation was reopened, the Obama doj could prosecute Manafort for the crimes it had decided to ignore two years earlier.

That’s an abuse of power. They manipulated the justice system to serve their own ends at their convenience. Now Manafort is sitting in solitary confinement at one of America’s most notorious prisons.

The Steele dossier wasn’t a one-off episode. This was not an isolated case of Barack Obama’s intelligence agencies mishandling information. This was a trend, and the abuse of the Manafort cash ledger provides more proof. It was a course of action that was deliberate, malicious and unconstitutional—and it all would have remained hidden if Hillary Clinton had won.

In his May-June 2018 Trumpet magazine feature article, “Saving America From the Radical Left—Temporarily,” editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote about the origin of the Trump-Russia investigation:

The entire Trump-Russia investigation is based on a hoax. Robert Mueller’s team has been searching for evidence of collusion for nearly a year and has found nothing.

But what has been revealed is a tremendous amount of lawbreaking by bureaucrats in intelligence and law enforcement! The previous president filled America’s law enforcement agencies with treasonous agents. He led what is known as the “deep state.” Something diabolical was going on until Mr. Trump was elected—and it is still going on behind the scenes during his presidency.

And the media aided and abetted the whole process! The more stories that come out, the clearer this ugly reality becomes.

This is corruption on a deep level—so deep that most people won’t even believe it!

Before the election, just about everyone believed Hillary Clinton would be the next president. If she had won, none of this corruption would have come to light!

We are getting a hard look at just what the radical left is willing to do in order to seize power and stay in power. They have no respect for the rule of law! They believe they are above the law. It is no exaggeration to say that such contempt for the nation’s founding principles is a threat to the republic!

Many Americans don’t recognize how serious these problems are. Imagine, though, if it happened to you. After an interview with President Trump, John Solomon said that the president feared that “if it could happen to me, it can happen to just about anyone in America.” The power of law enforcement must be held in check by rules like the Constitution. If not, tyranny results.

Mr. Flurry wrote: “Had Hillary Clinton been elected, the destructive trends that unfolded during the Obama presidency would have continued unchecked, and they surely would have intensified. Many people—including me—believe it would have meant an end to our constitutional republic!” None of this would be exposed if Clinton had won.

Now there are men in power, like Attorney General William Barr, who revere the Constitution and the rule of law. Mr. Barr has said he wants to find out how this whole hoax was started. He also said that the small group of leaders who facilitated this injustice are now out of power. Now the job of exposing what happened begins.

There is a dimension behind these scandals that few people understand. Most people cannot explain why this is happening. This disdain for agency rules and regulations and for individual rights represents a spirit of lawlessness that plagues every aspect of America. Why do the men and women at the top of government feel free to pick and choose which laws to apply? Why is the hatred for President Trump so intense that people are willing to sacrifice the ideals that made America a great nation to bring him down? The missing dimension that makes all these events clear can be found in Mr. Flurry’s free booklet America Under Attack.