Quoted:
Cautiously optimistic.  I see the original thread got moved to this forum.  Will this thread be the continuation or will the original thread be unlocked?

I move the original thread be unlocked and continued here.

WASHINGTON—Newly released FBI interview notes with former Deputy Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr show information gathered against Donald Trump by former British spy Christopher Steele for Hillary Clinton was distributed to the FBI and State Department in President Barack Obama’s administration in 2016.

Ohr told FBI agents during a Nov. 22, 2016, interview that “reporting on Trump’s ties to Russia were going to the [Hillary] Clinton campaign, Jon Winer at the U.S. State Department and the FBI,” according to one of the notes made public late Thursday by Judicial Watch.

Winer was a senior aide to then-Secretary of State John Kerry.

The non-profit government watchdog has repeatedly used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to break major stories in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation saga, and released 34 pages of FBI 302s, the form agents use to document their interviews.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded in April 2019 that no Trump campaign aide colluded with Russians.

The latest documents were obtained in the non-profit’s lawsuit following the government’s failure to respond to its Aug. 6, 2018, FOIA seeking the Form 302s.

Ohr was removed from his position in December 2017 for failing to disclose his wife Nellie’s employment with Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm at the center of the investigation. Nellie Ohr is a Russian specialist.

Bruce Ohr functioned as the key point man within the Department of Justice (DOJ) for distributing unverified anti-Trump materials Steele gathered from Russian sources.

Steele was retained by Fusion GPS for the task and was paid by Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) then under her control.

His materials were compiled into the infamous “Steele Dossier” that was used by the FBI to obtain warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to spy on low-level Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

In the Nov. 22, 2016, interview, Ohr told FBI agents Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. President.”

The same note also said “Ohr knew that Glen Simpson and others talking to Victoria Nuland at the U.S. State Department.” Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is president of Fusion GPS.

Simpson’s firm was retained by Perkins Coie, a prominent Washington law firm that represented the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

Other notes released by Judicial Watch showed that:

On Dec. 20, 2016, Ohr provided the FBI with his wife’s Fusion GPS research, “which contained the totality” of her work “but the Fusion GPS header was stripped.”

On Jan. 23, 2017, Ohr told the FBI that Steele told him that Steele “spoke with a staff member of Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) office sometime prior to October 2016.”

The FBI interviews show that Ohr repeatedly texted and talked to Steele using the WhatsApp application.

On Feb. 2, 2016, the FBI told Ohr to see if Steele would be “comfortable getting the name of an FBI agent” as a contact. Ohr tells the agents that U.S. State Department official Katheen Kavalec spoke with “Steele several times prior to the U.S. presidential election and believed Steele’s reporting to have [been] generated mainly from [REDACTED].”

On Feb. 14, 2017, Ohr told the FBI that Steele communicated with him via Facetime that Steele was “beginning to worry about his business.”  Steele discussed brokering new business with the FBI and told Ohr ‘you may see me re-emerge in a couple of weeks.”

On May 3, 2017, Steele called Ohr to tell him that he “had been worried about former FBI Director James Comey’s then-upcoming testimony to Congress, especially his response to questions that would be raised by [Sen. Chuck] Grassley.”  Although what he was specifically worried about is redacted, Steele was “happy with Director Comey’s response.”

“These new Bruce Ohr FBI 302s show an unprecedented and irregular effort by the FBI, DOJ, and State Department to dig up dirt on President Trump using the conflicted Bruce Ohr, his wife, and the Clinton/DNC spies at Fusion GPS,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement accompanying release of the documents.

“The FISA courts weren’t informed of this corrupted process when they were asked to approve and reapprove extraordinary spy warrants targeting President Trump,” Fitton said.

Judicial Watch previously uncovered documents showing Ohr received a $28,000 bonus during the period covered by the 302s. An Obama appointee, Ohr worked for then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The $28,000 bonus was nearly double his previous bonus of $14,500 in 2015.

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The wife of a high-ranking Justice Department official handed her husband a dossier of research on former Trump-campaign chairman Paul Manafort in December 2016, according to FBI documents released on Aug. 8.

Nellie Ohr, the wife of Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, gave him a report titled “Manafort Chronology.” Bruce Ohr gave the report to the FBI on Dec. 19, 2016.

Nellie Ohr compiled the Manafort report as part of her work for Fusion GPS. The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) paid Fusion GPS $1 million to conduct opposition research on then-candidate Donald Trump. Fusion GPS hired Nellie Ohr to conduct open-source opposition research in 2015.

The revelation about the Manafort report is part of a batch of FBI documents memorializing the bureau’s interviews with Bruce Ohr. Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch obtained the documents (pdf) as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the bureau.

“These new Bruce Ohr FBI 302s show an unprecedented and irregular effort by the FBI, DOJ, and State Department to dig up dirt on President Trump using the conflicted Bruce Ohr, his wife, and the Clinton/DNC spies at Fusion GPS,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.

Both the existence of a Fusion GPS-produced dossier on Manafort and the way the document made it to the FBI have not been previously disclosed to the public. The documents raise additional questions about what role the politically funded opposition research played in the government’s investigation of Manafort, who would go on to be prosecuted and sentenced for several crimes unrelated to his work on the Trump campaign.

Fusion GPS is best known for commissioning the Clinton-funded dossier of opposition research on Trump. Former British spy Christopher Steele compiled the dossier using second-hand and third-hand sources with ties to the Kremlin. The FBI used the dossier as evidence to secure a warrant to surveil former Trump campaign associate Carter Page over the course of a year starting in October 2016.

“The FISA courts weren’t informed of this corrupted process when they were asked to approve and reapprove extraordinary spy warrants targeting President Trump,” Fitton said.

In a subsequent interview with the FBI on Dec. 20, 2016, Ohr handed the FBI agents a thumb drive containing the totality of Nellie Ohr’s research for Fusion GPS. The documents inside the drive had the Fusion GPS headers stripped.

In addition to researching Manafort, Nellie Ohr told Congress in October last year that she conducted research on Trump-campaign associate Carter Page and Trump-campaign supporter Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in addition to Trump’s family, including some of his children.

Nellie Ohr worked for the CIA for at least two years starting in 2008.

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Jeffrey Epstein and a friend sent an underage girl to have sex with former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell and asset manager Glenn Dubin, she testified in court documents that were made public for the first time Friday -- allegations the three deny.

Virginia Giuffre, now an adult, says she was also sent to modeling executive Jean Luc Brunel and the late MIT scientist Marvin Minsky, according to parts of a 2016 deposition she gave. The testimony by Giuffre, who claims she was a “sex slave” for Epstein from 2000 to 2002, expands on her previous allegations, in court filings and tabloids, that she was forced to have sex with the U.K.’s Prince Andrew and Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz. Both men have strenuously denied those allegations.

Epstein, a convicted sex offender, faces new federal criminal charges of sexually trafficking minors. None of the other men were defendants in the settled lawsuit, and they haven’t been accused by authorities. But their appearance in the newly public papers adds to the list of those who could be tarnished by their apparent association with him.

Richardson, in a statement, said he’d never met Giuffre, called the allegations “completely false” and said that during his limited interactions with Epstein he’d never seen him in the presence of underage girls.

Mitchell said the allegation in the released documents is false. In a statement, he said he never met, spoke with or had contact with Giuffre, or knew of or suspected that Epstein had inappropriate conduct with underage girls.

Dubin and his wife, Eva, called the allegations “demonstrably false and defamatory.” In an emailed statement, a spokeswoman added: “The Dubins have flight records and other evidence that definitively disprove that any such events occurred.”

Brunel couldn’t be reached for comment. A person answering the phones at his modeling agency declined to connect a Bloomberg reporter with him.

Giuffre’s lawyer Sigrid McCawley said the denials are predictable, calling them “bumper-sticker like statements.”

“The truth will have the final word,” McCawley said in an emailed statement. “Virginia Roberts Giuffre is a survivor and a woman to be believed. She believes a reckoning of inevitable accountability has begun.”

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The “sister” of the Dayton, Ohio, shooter who was killed during the attack identified as a transgender guy — although his family had no idea, according to a report and some of his own social media posts.

Connor Betts’ 22-year-old sibling was named by authorities as Megan Betts in the days after the mass shooting, with cops releasing a statement saying relatives had lost “a daughter.”

But he apparently went by the name Jordan Cofer, and identified as a male, although he was only “out” to a small circle of friends, according to Splinter News, which spoke to several of those pals anonymously.

“Jordan was my closest friend,” one pal told the outlet. “He identified with he/him pronouns to people he trusted and knew would support him. Jordan was probably one of the sweetest people you would ever meet, a true saint, but he was also very scared constantly. He tried to give the best to everyone.”

One of his friends also confirmed to The Post: “I did know that he was indeed a trans man.”

On Sunday, the 24-year-old killer drove to a popular strip of bars and restaurants with Jordan — then made him one of the nine victims killed in the slaughter, officials said. Investigators have not yet identified his motive or whether his sibling was an intended target.


Nearly half of Americans expect another mass shooting in next 3 months: poll


But his gender likely didn’t play a role in his death because Betts had no clue about his brother’s trans status, a friend told Splinter News.

“Jordan told me in the past that he was not out to his family, but that could have changed in the past month as we barely spoke of the topic recently,” said the friend. “I do not believe that his gender identity had played a part in his death because of the fact that he wasn’t out to many people.”

In a Tumblr account that also appears to be his, Jordan describes himself as an “ace poly trans boy with a loving heart and way too much work to do,” according to the outlet, which confirmed that the account was legit through a friend.

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When it comes to serial and systemic frauds perpetrated by big banks on Wall Street, the U.S. Department of Justice typically punts. It will either not charge the bank itself or it will issue a felony charge along with a non-prosecution agreement that lets the bank settle the charges without a trial. These tactics by the Justice Department are why Wall Street crimes remain serial and systemic in nature.

This morning, the Attorney General in Malaysia stunned Goldman Sachs with an indictment of 17 of its former and current executives. That came on the heels of criminal charges filed last December by Malaysian authorities in the same matter against three Goldman Sachs subsidiaries and two former Goldman employees, Tim Leissner and Roger Ng.

Indictments announced this morning included charges against Richard J. Gnodde, Goldman’s top international banker in London and former Goldman executive J. Michael Evans, who is currently president of Alibaba.

The charges stem from a Malaysia state development fund, 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) for which Goldman Sachs underwrote $6.5 billion in bonds in 2012 and 2013. Goldman made an outsized $600 million in fees on the deals. According to prosecutors, $4.5 billion in 1MDB funds have gone missing, of which at least $2.7 billion was stolen according to prosecutors.

Malaysia Attorney General Tommy Thomas said jail time and criminal fines will be sought against those indicted given the “severity of the scheme to defraud and fraudulent misappropriation of billions in bond proceeds” and “the lengthy period over which the offences were planned and executed….”

The 1MDB Malaysian fund was established in 2009 by then Prime Minister Najib Razak on the pretext of using it for economic development. Razak has also been indicted in Malaysia and has pleaded not guilty.

The whereabouts of some of the money is known: it bought luxury real estate, a private jet, paintings by Van Gogh and Monet. Some of the money even was invested in the Hollywood film, The Wolf of Wall Street starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

Contrast how Malaysia has moved to hold key Goldman Sachs executives accountable versus what the U.S. Department of Justice has done. On November 1 of last year, the Justice Department announced charges against former Goldman employees Tim Leissner and Roger Ng and a financier involved in the dealings, Jho Low. But the Justice Department did not bring charges against any of the three units of Goldman Sachs that were involved and its press release is even too timid to mention the name Goldman Sachs. It refers simply to “U.S. Financial Institution #1,” suggesting it believes Goldman Sachs somehow deserves reputational protection.

It’s important to recall that the Justice Department let Goldman Sachs wiggle out of criminal prosecution with a payment of $550 million in 2010 over its role in facilitating a $1 billion fraud called Abacus. Goldman Sachs allowed the hedge fund, John Paulson & Co., to select mortgage bonds that were likely to fail to put into the deal so that the hedge fund could short the deal and end up making $1 billion. Goldman Sachs pitched the deal to its investors as a sound investment. Those investors ended up losing the same $1 billion that Paulson & Co. made in profits. A lowly Goldman Sachs’ salesman on the deal, Fabrice Tourre, was the only Goldman employee to be charged in the matter. Tourre was found guilty at trial but also got off by paying a fine. (See John Paulson and the Ick Factor at NYU.)

Then there was the case of Carmen Segarra, the bank examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who wanted to flunk Goldman Sachs on its examination for failing to have a firm-wide conflict of interest policy. Segarra got fired instead but not before she had purchased a tiny microphone and tape-recorded the crony conversations her bosses were having about Goldman Sachs. When Segarra attempted to get justice in a Federal Court in Manhattan, she belatedly learned that her Judge’s husband had received a fortunate legal advisory job from Goldman Sachs. (See A Mangled Case of Justice on Wall Street.)

It’s also important to remember the PBS Frontline program in 2013 which exposed that the Justice Department was not using any of the standard law enforcement tools to bring criminal charges against Wall Street banks and their executives: no subpoenas, no wiretaps. This is the relevant part of the transcript of that program with Frontline Producer Martin Smith and the then head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer. The program was appropriately titled “The Untouchables.”

NARRATOR: Frontline spoke to two former high-level Justice Department prosecutors who served in the Criminal Division under Lanny Breuer. In their opinion, Breuer was overly fearful of losing.

MARTIN SMITH: We spoke to a couple of sources from within the Criminal Division, and they reported that when it came to Wall Street, there were no investigations going on. There were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps.

LANNY BREUER: Well, I don’t know who you spoke with because we have looked hard at the very types of matters that you’re talking about.

MARTIN SMITH: These sources said that at the weekly indictment approval meetings that there was no case ever mentioned that was even close to indicting Wall Street for financial crimes.

At 10:00 a.m. this morning, after the stock market had been open for 30 minutes, Goldman Sachs’ stock had lost very little ground despite the news of 17 criminal indictments related to its role in 1MDB. It was trading down less than one-half of one percent – very much in line with other big Wall Street banks. Perhaps that’s because Goldman Sachs has something else going for it – the Securities and Exchange Commission allows it to trade its own stock in its own Dark Pool.

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August 9, 2019 at 8:47 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 110 Comments

Associated Press: “As Donald Trump prepares to leave Friday for his annual August holiday at his lush New Jersey golf club, he’s confronting a storm of crises, at home and abroad, that could set the course for his upcoming re-election bid.”

“The dark clouds are converging as the president’s bid for a second term takes on new urgency. Trump exudes confidence but as the two dozen Democrats eager to take his job sharpen their attacks, the White House — or, for the next 10 days, the clubhouse in Bedminster, New Jersey — will have to mount a multifront effort rooted in maintaining his base rather than trying to expand it.”

By Carli Teproff
July 29, 2019 05:40 PM, Updated July 30, 2019 02:01 AM
Investigators served a federal search warrant Monday morning as part of a criminal investigation at a Southwest Miami-Dade home that is used as a daycare center.

A man, who is the son of the daycare owner, was arrested as part of a child porn investigation, sources close to the investigation say. Authorities did not identify him.

Special agents with Homeland Security Investigations showed up at Little Seeds Academy, 10470 SW 40th St., at about 4:30 a.m. Monday.

Investigators hauled out computers and other electronic equipment.

Nestor Yglesias, a spokesman for Homeland Security Investigations, could not say what the investigation is about, but confirmed that a warrant was served.

The academy, which incorporated in 2003, is registered to Luis Ancarola, records show.

Parents told Miami Herald newspartner CBS4 that they were very concerned about the arrest.

“You see these people every day, you just don’t expect these things to happen especially here in a facility where children are,” parent Zaira Perez told the station. “I have three kids here. I have my baby, a 4-year-old and another who used to go to school here so our main concern is that they are all OK and none are involved in this situation. This is the worst nightmare for any parent.”

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Did Jeffrey Epstein win the Oklahoma Powerball lottery, July 2, 2008?

A financial planning company based in Oklahoma City received $29.2 million on Monday on behalf of the Zorro Trust, which held the winning ticket from the July 2 drawing.

The Daily Oklahoman, 26 Aug 2008: Trust keeps Powerball winner a mystery. Only Lottery Commission knows who is now $29.3 million richer. A financial planning company based in Oklahoma City received $29.3 million Monday on behalf of the Zorro Trust, which held the winning ticket from the July 2 drawing.

On July 1 st, 2008, Epstein started to serve his 18-month jail term in Florida as Inmate No. W35755.

The Daily article discloses: Trusts shield the winner or winners from the kind of publicity that Finks specializes in. “We were hopeful that they would come in, but as time passed, we know they were going to form a trust,” Finks said. Instead, the July 2nd ticket of $29.3 million was paid out to a mysterious financial planning company, “Zorro Trust”.

So is Zorro Trust actually Jeffrey Epstein?

?

“Zorro Trust is headed by Jeffrey Epstein of New York City, who, King said planned to form Zorro Ranch. Epstein couldn’t be reached for comment.”

Read more to find out:

https://medium.com/@nathanielhebert/did-jeffrey-epstein-win-the-oklahoma-powerball-lottery-july-2-2008-d23d2b0933e5

By Martin Hickman July 10, 2014

From politicians’ fraudulent expenses to phone hacking, Britain has become surprisingly scandal-strewn in recent years, but the latest reputational cyclone to sweep across its shores is casting an especially dark light: pedophilia in high places.

Newspapers and TV bulletins have been dominated for the past week by allegations that politicians with links to Margaret Thatcher’s government sexually abused vulnerable children in the 1980s and hid the truth for decades through their “chumocracy.” Suspicions of an establishment cover-up involving government departments, Scotland Yard and other elements of the establishment intensified in recent days when the law-and-order ministry, the Home Office, confirmed dozens of potentially-relevant files alleging sexual misconduct had gone missing from its archives.

The allegations—which centre around the suggestion that politicians of all parties and other VIPs preyed on children at a guest house in the London suburb of Barnes—have been given greater credence because in the past two years a string of national figures have been exposed as predatory pedophiles.

Most notoriously of all, Sir Jimmy Savile, a BBC children’s television presenter feted by the Royal Family and Downing Street, abused 450 victims, mostly boys and girls as young as eight over 50 years. While Savile had long been seen as odd, the scale of his offenses shocked the country, not least because he was allowed special access to hospitals and the authorities laughed at or ignored his victims, before he died a national hero. An ensuing police inquiry, Operation Yewtree – which has arrested 18 TV presenters, comedians, disc jockeys and other showbusiness associates – last month jailed fellow BBC children’s presenter Rolf Harris for indecent assaults dating back decades, on girls as young as 8.

Into this febrile atmosphere, Tom Watson, a Labour Party lawmaker, told the House of Commons in October 2012 that police should “investigate clear intelligence suggesting a powerful pedophile network linked to Parliament and Number 10.” Newspaper columnists suggested Watson – whose campaigning on phone hacking contributed to the downfall of the Prime Minister communications director Andy Coulson ­– was stoking a “witch-hunt.” But as a result of Watson and online news agency Exaro’s investigations, Scotland Yard launched Operation Fernbridge, an inquiry into the now-notorious Elm Guest House.

One confirmed visitor through its front door was Cyril Smith, a jovial 406-pound Liberal MP who was shown after his death to have been a serial abuser of boys at a local authority care home in his home town of Rochdale. Private Eye investigative magazine has suggested that Special Branch, the UK’s national security police, halted police inquiries into Smith in the 1970s to prevent the collapse of the Liberal-Labour coalition government. Attention then swept back to its successor government. In 1983, the far-right Conservative MP, Geoffrey Dickens, compiled a 40-page dossier alleging pedophilia among Westminster politicians and gave it to the Home Office and Attorney General’s Office. This year, the Home Office discovered that 114 files potentially relevant to historic allegations of sexual abuse, including the Dickens dossier, had gone missing.

A year ago Lord Brittan, the Home Secretary to whom Dickens handed his dossier, told reporters he could not recall anything about it. But last week following the intervention of another campaigning MP in Parliament, Lord Brittan issued a statement remembering that he had received the dossier and had asked his officials to study its contents. Over the weekend it emerged that Lord Brittan had been interviewed as a suspect in the rape of a 19-year-old in 1967; an allegation he dismissed as “wholly without foundation.”

On Monday, Home Secretary Theresa May announced an inquiry into the failures of the authorities to protect children. To the dismay of many, she then said it would be led by Dame Butler-Sloss, a respected family judge but also the sister of the late former Attorney General Michael Havers, who was passed a copy of the Dickens dossier, and who decided not to prosecute a diplomat for exchanging obscene material with members of a pro-pedophilia group.

What does all this mean for Britain?

A new openness among police and prosecutors has led to the number of sexual offenses recorded by police jumping 17% in a year; Britain’s jails are bursting partly as a result of “historic sex abuse cases.“

More high-profile prosecutions of pedophilia may shock the country; according to one whistleblower, allegations of sexual abuse have been made against 20 VIPs. Much will hinge over the next two years on the new inquiry, which, conveniently for politicians, will not be public until after the 2015 general election.

For now the scandal is likely to increase the public’s jaundiced view about politics and public life in the UK. Research last year found that political engagement was low and trust in institutions had been damaged by the MPs’ expenses scandal, interest-rate fixing and other controversies. Disaffection with the three main political parties helped the far-right United Kingdom Independence Party, which wants to withdraw from the European Union, win the 2014 European Parliament elections.

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TBS I would like to thank you and site staff for accommodating this thread, it's participants, and it's readers.  There can be no assertion that no attempt has been made.  You all have actually gone beyond what would be considered reasonable.  Again, thank you.