DiGenova Calls Admiral Mike Rogers’ Cooperation With Durham Team to Be the ‘Biggest Single Development’ in Case, Here’s Why

Posted at 1:30 pm on December 26, 2019 by Elizabeth Vaughn

Navy Vice Adm. Michael Rogers testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 11, 2014, before the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing to become an admiral and director, National Security Agency/Chief, Central Security Services/Commander, United States Cyber Command. (Lauren Victoria Burke/AP Photo)

Last week, it was reported that Admiral Mike Rogers, who served as Director of the National Security Agency under President Obama, has been cooperating with U.S. Attorney John Durham’s criminal inquiry into the origins of the Trump/Russia collusion investigation. This was big news for two reasons.

I wrote about the first reason in a recent post, in which I called Rogers the “Unsung Hero.” He was one of the few Obama administration officials who actually had integrity, a man who noticed that something was amiss and acted. It was this man who traveled to Trump Tower on November 17, 2016, to brief then-President-elect Donald Trump that communications from the building were being tapped. He did not notify his superior, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, beforehand.

Later that day, the Trump transition team announced they were moving their operations to a new location in New Jersey. Within days, the Washington Post reported that “James Clapper and Defense Secretary Ash Carter had recommended the removal of Mike Rogers from his NSA position.” Rogers was not fired, for obvious reasons.

The second reason predates the FBI’s application to the FISA Court for a warrant to spy on Carter Page by a couple of years, but in light of IG Horowitz’s report, this story becomes even more relevant. Rogers discovered that American citizens were being spied upon and drew attention to the abuse of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by the Obama administration. According to former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova, Section 702 allows the government to essentially weaponize the NSA’s ability to collect data and surveil private U.S. citizens.

Used as intended, it has been a useful law enforcement tool. Abused as it had been by Obama administration officials up until Rogers’ discovery in 2014, it became a weapon. DiGenova said, “For more than four years before the election of Donald Trump, there was an illegal spying operation going on by FBI [private] contractors — four of them — to steal personal information, electronic information about Americans and to use it against the Republican Party.”

In a Christmas Eve interview with WMAL radio station (audio below), diGenova explains how the FBI’s efforts to cover up the 702 spying brought us “Crossfire Hurricane.” Rogers discovered it and reported it to the FISA Court and said “she” stopped it (I assume “she” refers to FISC Judge Rosemary Collyer). DiGenova says it led to the “crescendo of activity by Comey, Clapper, and Brennan. It led to the so-called Crossfire Hurricane investigation to cover-up the previous spying that had been going on.”

Rogers has an electronic trail of all the spying that went on over five years. He has personal notes – like Jim Comey – only this time they are not self-serving notes, they are the truth…I have described Mike Rogers as the Rosetta Stone of this investigation…I can be fairly confident now in saying there will be a substantial criminal conspiracy indictment against a lot of people with the electronic spying.

That electronic spying that went on from 2012 through 2016 into NSA databases was used for unmasking people and then leaking that information to the press.

DiGenova is asked if this includes the unmaskings that involved Susan Rice and Loretta Lynch and he says yes.

Next, he directs our attention to the famous press conference given by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) in March 2017, while serving as the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Nunes, whose efforts to expose the corruption have been monumental, was widely criticized after this presser. DiGenova explains what Nunes had just seen at the NSC prior to meeting with reporters. What he saw…

were spreadsheets which had been produced by the White House of the intercepts, the illegal NSA intercepts, and on it were the names of people, telephone numbers, to and from information, which led to the unmaskings. That’s what this is all about. It is truly remarkable that we have finally gotten here.

(Note: Nunes discussed this day in detail in an interview with Dan Bongino which aired on Tuesday. The audio is available here.)

They discuss the significance of the Obama White House using these intercepts, which are meant to be used to thwart terrorist attacks, against their opponents for political purposes. DiGenova calls it a stunning scandal of immense proportions that is being ignored by the Washington Post and the New York Times. He wants everyone to be aware of the April 2018 ruling by Judge Collyer about the spying by FBI contractors. He explains:

Collyer wrote an opinion where she exposed, on the public record, the names of all the people which had been blotted out…all the people in the DOJ and the FBI who were involved in the illegal database searches, the three FBI contractors for example, are named in there, but their names are blotted out. She told everybody about this and nobody did anything about it and nobody did anything about it on Capitol Hill except for one person, Devin Nunes. Nunes and Mike Rogers should both get the Medal of Freedom from President Trump. They are heroes, American heroes.

When Mike Rogers found out about the electronic spying that had been going on for years, and then about the spying that had been going on inside the Trump campaign, he not only went to the FISA Court, he went to Trump, you will recall on November 17, 2016 and warned him about what was going on.

At that very point, Ash Carter, the Secretary of Defense, and James Clapper, the DNI, tried to get Admiral Rogers fired. It didn’t happen because Obama knew that everything would come out immediately.

DiGenova is asked if he believes Judge Collyer is doing “enough” in reaction to the IG report. The answer is no.

This is too little, too late. This is grandstanding and save your ass kind of stuff by a federal judge. There should have been contempt hearings before the FISA Court already. She didn’t have to wait. She knew everything. She knew back in 2018 that there was illegal spying. She knew she’d been lied to in the Carter Page affidavit. She knew that the assistant attorney general for the National Security Division, John Carlin, had filed false annual certifications of compliance with minimization standards on 702 databases about Americans.

Let’s remember what this scandal is about…This is about spying on American citizens with no basis whatsoever. We now know the spying on Carter Page was completely baseless. He had nothing to do with the Russians. He was cooperating with the CIA. He was never charged with a crime…

As a result of this 702 database illegal spying by FBI contractors from 2012 through 2016, where they access telephones, emails, text message databases on Americans, not foreign nationals. Thousands of Americans were spied on. What did Judge Collyer do about it? Nothing.

Now, I want to see every one of those five judges up there on Capitol Hill in a hearing. They need to testify about the Carter Page warrant.

When they saw in that first warrant there was a political organization involved in opposition research, that warrant should have been stopped right there.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel devoted her column to exactly this. I wrote about this in a post entitled “Where Was FISA Court Judge Collyer’s Concern in 2018 When Devin Nunes Brought These Issues to Her Attention?” Nunes wrote to Judge Collyer on February 7th, 2018 to tell her what his committee had found during their investigation of the FBI’s four applications. He wrote, “The Committee found that the FBI and DOJ failed to disclose the specific political actors paying for uncorroborated information that went to the court, misled the FISC regarding dissemination of this information, and failed to correct these errors in the subsequent renewals.” Mr. Nunes “asked the court whether any transcripts of FISC hearings about this application existed, and if so, to provide them to the committee.” Collyer was dismissive. He tried again to bring this wrongdoing to her attention in June 2018 with the same result.

Judge Collyer failed to act when she should have. Once the FBI’s abuses were revealed to the world, she was forced to respond. DiGenova is entirely correct to call this “save your ass kind of stuff by a federal judge.”

For so long, we’ve waited for an Obama administration insider who was willing to speak the truth. The topic of the unprecedented unmaskings attributed to Samantha Powers and Susan Rice has come up often enough, but has always been dismissed. Up until now, there’s has been very little known about it. With his firsthand and technical knowledge, it is clear that Mike Rogers’ cooperation with the Durham Team will do much to clarify the “why” of it all and will help to fill in many of the blanks.

DiGenova said that Rogers has already met with members of the Durham team “multiple” times. It’s possible that information he’s provided led to Durham’s request for John Brennan’s communications records from the CIA. Either way, this is a monumental development.

Country Music Star Uses Old Kaepernick Picture To Destroy Nike

Country Music Star Uses Old Kaepernick Picture To Destroy Nike

The Holy Family

Sometime it is just funny..... Lighten up everyone...

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This what the Democrats are impeaching our President for.

Looks like the Liberal Left votes against the USA every time also!

We only have....

Trump has not been impeached.... Yet

Trump Isn’t Impeached Until the House Tells the Senate


Is pelosi infringing on President Trumps 6th amendment rights?

Then and Now

What’s Hidden in the Senate Spending Bill?

Television crews set up in the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building waiting to interview lawmakers on Wednesday. The Senate is expected to vote on a spending bill on Thursday.Credit...Erin Schaff for The New York Times

By Margot Sanger-Katz, Brad Plumer, Erica L. Green and Jim Tankersley

Tucked into the Senate budget bill are a host of provisions that help a broad array of industries and sectors, including energy, health care and education, through increased spending and tax credits.

The Senate deal would raise strict spending caps on domestic and military spending in this fiscal year and the next by about $300 billion. It would also lift the federal debt limit until March 2019 and provide nearly $90 billion in disaster relief to deal with last year’s fires and hurricanes.

It also includes a series of unexpected spending increases, including restoring some provisions that were jettisoned from last year’s $1.5 trillion tax package. And the bill includes an extension of 48 different tax credits that expired at the end of 2016, including several incentives meant to help particular sectors like mining and horse racing.

Here are some of the provisions included in the 600-plus-page bill, which heads for a vote later today:

A cost watchdog is repealed, among other Medicare adjustments.

The bill would kill an unpopular provision of the Affordable Care Act, its Independent Payment Advisory Board, which was devised to help keep Medicare spending growth from rising above a set level. No one has ever been appointed to the board, and its services have not yet been needed — Medicare spending has experienced unusually slow growth rates in recent years — but the board was long denounced by Republicans as a rationing board, and disliked by some Democrats for taking payment policy authority away from Congress.

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The bill extends a number of special payment bonuses for different Medicare providers, many of which were once intended to be temporary, but get regularly continued. Those include extra payments for rural hospitals, a higher payment rate for ambulances, and increased payment rates to certain Medicare doctors. It preserves loan repayment programs for health providers who choose to work in underserved areas, and preserves funding for hospitals that train residents.

The bill expands pilot programs meant to test the value of in-home care for some Medicare patients. And it expands the ability of private Medicare Advantage plans to offer so-called “telehealth,” where doctors treat patients over the phone or internet. It would allow Medicare providers who are part of an accountable care association to offer patients cash bonuses as incentives for healthy behaviors.

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The bill increases discounts that pharmaceutical companies must give seniors enrolled in the Medicare Part D drug plans, by making the so-called “doughnut hole” smaller. This was a policy that was part of the Affordable Care Act, but the new legislation would speed up implementation by one year.

Funding changes for public health programs.

The spending plan would cut $1.35 billion in funding to an Affordable Care Act program meant to improve public health and prevention funding for states and municipalities.

Another extension for the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

It would extend funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program for an additional four years. Last month’s spending bill had already extended the program for six years, so now CHIP will be funded for an entire decade. Another popular program that delivers health care to low income children and adults, the government-funded clinics known as Community Health Centers, will also get a two-year funding extension.

Budget Deficits Are Projected to Balloon Under the Bipartisan Spending Deal

The two-year budget agreement reached by Senate leaders would contribute hundreds of billions of dollars to federal deficits.

Continued funding for abstinence education.

The bill would extend funding to abstinence-only sex education programs.

A break for Berea College.

The spending bill restores a provision that was stripped out of last year’s $1.5 trillion tax bill after the Senate parliamentarian objected to its inclusion.

The bill would exempt Berea College, a small private college in Kentucky that provides free tuition, from being subject to a new tax on large higher education endowments that was included in last year’s tax law.

The bill adds language that makes the new excise tax on investment income applicable only to schools with “tuition-paying” students, shielding Berea College, which does not charge tuition. The school is in the home state of Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader.

Tax breaks for racetracks and horse owners continue.

Owners of race horses and motor sports entertainment complexes would get an extension of special tax treatment. Horse owners are allowed to depreciate their horses over the course of three years. For racetracks, the depreciation is over the course of seven years. Those breaks would remain in place for 2017.

Extension and expansion of energy tax credits.

The Senate bill features a multitude of tax breaks for renewable energy sources that had been neglected in a 2015 deal to bolster wind and solar power. These so-called “orphaned” technologies include geothermal, small wind farms and fuel cells. Much like existing credits for wind and solar power, these incentives would phase out starting in 2020.

The bill also extends an existing production tax credit for nuclear power past 2020, which would benefit a pair of long-delayed reactors being built in Georgia that aren’t expected to come online before 2021. Southern Company has said it may not be able to complete the reactors, the only two still under construction in the United States, without the credit.

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A separate measure would greatly expand a tax credit for companies that capture carbon dioxide from power plants or other polluting facilities and pump it underground. Oil firms such as Occidental Petroleum have been pumping captured CO2 into old wells in order to extract additional oil. Some environmental groups also lobbied for the measure, arguing that carbon capture technology, still in its infancy, could one day prove a crucial tool for tackling climate change.

The bill retroactively extends tax credits for biodiesel, advanced biofuels and fuel-cell vehicles through the end of 2017. Industry lobbyists had unsuccessfully fought to get many of these measures included in the tax overhaul bill passed by Congress in December. They could still face resistance in the House.

A tax credit for mining safety.

The bill extends a tax credit for 20 percent of an employers’ spending on mine rescue team training costs, up to $10,000. A separate provision allows the immediate deduction of a company’s investment in mine safety equipment.

A special rate for timber sales.

The bill continues a special tax rate of 23.8 percent for 2017 for gains from timber sales, a break from the top rate of 35 percent that would have otherwise applied.

Here’s what Congress is stuffing into its $1.3 trillion spending bill

Congressional negotiators reached a tentative agreement Wednesday night on a $1.3 trillion federal spending bill, releasing it to the public just 52 hours before a government shutdown deadline. The draft bill runs 2,232 pages, and we’re going through it so you don’t have to. Here are key highlights:

Overall spending: The “omnibus” appropriations bill doles out funding for the remainder of fiscal 2018 — that is, until Sept. 30 — to virtually every federal department and agency pursuant to the two-year budget agreement Congress reached in February. Under that agreement, defense spending generally favored by Republicans is set to jump $80 billion over previously authorized spending levels, while domestic spending favored by Democrats rises by $63 billion. The defense funding includes a 2.4 percent pay raise for military personnel and $144 billion for Pentagon hardware. The domestic spending is scattered across the rest of the federal government, but lawmakers are highlighting increases in funding for infrastructure, medical research, veterans programs and efforts to combat the opioid epidemic. Civilian federal employees get a 1.9 percent pay raise, breaking parity with the military for the first time in several years.

Border wall: The bill provides $1.6 billion for barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border but with serious strings attached. Of the total, $251 million is earmarked specifically for “secondary fencing” near San Diego, where fencing is already in place; $445 million is for no more than 25 miles of “levee fencing”; $196 million is for “primary pedestrian fencing” in the Rio Grande Valley; $445 million is for the replacement of existing fencing in that area; and the rest is for planning, design and technology — not for wall construction. The biggest catch is this: The barriers authorized to be built under the act must be “operationally effective designs” already deployed as of last March, meaning none of President Trump’s big, beautiful wall prototypes can be built.

Immigration enforcement: The bill bumps up funding for both U.S. Customs and Border Protection and for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — delivering increases sought by the Trump administration. But there are significant restrictions on how that new money can be spent. Democrats pushed for, and won, limitations on hiring new ICE interior enforcement agents and on the number of undocumented immigrants the agency can detain. Under provisions written into the bill, ICE can have no more than 40,354 immigrants in detention by the time the fiscal year ends in September. But there is a catch: The Homeland Security secretary is granted discretion to transfer funds from other accounts “as necessary to ensure the detention of aliens prioritized for removal.”

Infrastructure: Numerous transportation programs get funding increases in the bill, but the debate leading up to its release focused on one megaproject: The Gateway program, aimed at improving rail access to and from Manhattan on Amtrak and New Jersey Transit. Trump made it a signature fight, largely to punish Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and other Democratic backers of the project who have held up other Trump initiatives, and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao told Congress this month that the project simply wasn’t ready for prime time. The project is not mentioned in the bill, and Republican aides say that they turned back efforts to essentially earmark federal funding for the project. But Democrats say that the project is still eligible for as much as $541 million in funding this fiscal year through accounts that Chao does not control. The project might also still qualify for other pools of money, though it will have to compete with other projects on an equal playing field.

Health care: Left out of the bill was a health-care measure sought by GOP Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) that would have allowed states to establish high-risk pools to help cover costly insurance claims while restoring certain payments to insurers under the Affordable Care Act. Trump, who ended the “cost-sharing reduction” payments in the fall, supported the Collins-Alexander language. But Democrats opposed it, because they said it included language expanding the existing prohibition on federal funding for abortions.

Guns: The bill includes the Fix NICS Act, bipartisan legislation aimed at improving the National Instant Criminal Background Check System that is used to screen U.S. gun buyers. It provides for incentives and penalties to encourage federal agencies and states to send records to the federal database in an effort to prevent the type of oversight that preceded last year’s church massacre in Sutherland Springs, Tex. Democrats pushed for more aggressive gun laws, including universal background checks, but won only a minor concession: Language in the report accompanying the bill clarifying that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can, in fact, conduct research into gun violence. A long-standing rider known as the Dickey Amendment, which states that no CDC funds “may be used to advocate or promote gun control,” has been interpreted in the past to bar such research. The amendment itself remains.

Taxes: The “grain glitch,” a provision in the new GOP tax law that favored farmer-owned cooperatives over traditional agriculture corporations by providing a significantly larger tax benefit for sales to cooperatives, is undone in the bill. Farm-state lawmakers and farming groups said that without a fix, the tax law could disrupt the farm economy and even put some companies out of business. The spending bill tweaks the tax law to level the playing field between sales to coops and corporations. Democrats in exchange got a 12.5 percent increase in annual allocations for a low-income housing tax credit for four years.

Internal Revenue Service: Despite the administration’s attempts to slash its budget, lawmakers grant $11.431 billion to the nation’s tax collectors, a $196 million year-to-year increase and $456 million more than Trump requested. The figure includes $320 million to implement changes enacted as part of the GOP tax overhaul plan.

Opioids: The bill increases funding to tackle the opioid epidemic, a boost that lawmakers from both parties hailed as a win. The legislation allocates more than $4.65 billion across agencies to help states and local governments on efforts toward prevention, treatment and law enforcement initiatives. That represents a $3 billion increase over 2017 spending levels.

Foreign policy: Included in the spending bill is the Taylor Force Act. Named after an American who was killed by a Palestinian in 2016, the measure curtails certain economic assistance to the Palestinian Authority until it stops financially supporting convicted terrorists and their families. It unanimously passed the House last year.

Baseball: Should the bill pass, some minor-league ballplayers could see a raise this year — but only barely. The Save America’s Pastime Act exempts pro baseball players from federal labor laws and has been a major lobbying priority for Major League Baseball ever since minor-league players began suing the league in recent years for paying them illegally low wages. The version in the bill exempts only players working under a contract that pays minimum wage, but there are major loopholes: The contract has to pay minimum wage for a only 40-hour workweek during the season, not spring training or the offseason — and it includes no guarantee of overtime even though baseball prospects routinely work long hours. Thus, under the bill, a player is guaranteed a minimum salary of $1,160 a month. The current minor-league minimum is $1,100 a month.

Election security: The bill provides $380 million to the federal Election Assistance Commission to make payments to states to improve election security and technology, and the FBI is set to receive $300 million in counterintelligence funding to combat Russian hacking.

Congressional misconduct: The House appears to have gone further than the Senate to address concerns about how allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct are handled on Capitol Hill. The House set aside $4 million to pay for mandatory workplace rights training and plans to create a new Office of Employee Advocacy to assist employees in proceedings before the Office of Compliance or House Ethics Committees. House leaders also made a point of highlighting plans to expand the House Day Care Center. But senators failed to reach agreement on making changes to how allegations of wrongdoing are handled, so they won’t be included in the bill.

Congressional Research Service: The bill mandates that reports published by Congress’s in-house researchers be published online for public consumption. Historically, such reports have not been easy to access online, and a House Appropriations subcommittee took the lead last year in finally forcing transparency.

District of Columbia: The nation’s capital will see a slight dip in its federal funding. Lawmakers provide $721 million in direct federal funding to the District, a $35 million drop from last year — mostly because of a $22 million cut in emergency planning money that was used to prepare for the 2017 presidential inauguration. Lawmakers also kept out GOP attempts to block the District’s budget autonomy act and its assisted suicide law.

Religion and politics: The federal ban on tax-exempt churches engaging in political activity, known as the Johnson Amendment, will continue, despite attempts by Trump and GOP lawmakers to rescind it.

Jury duty: If you serve on a federal jury, your daily pay rate will increase to $50 per day — a bipartisan win sought in part after two dozen federal grand jurors in Washington petitioned House and Senate judiciary committee members last fall, saying the current pay rate is “abysmal,” below the minimum wage and a hardship.

Secret Service: The agency responsible for protecting the president and his family gets $2.007 billion, including $9.9 million for overtime worked without pay in 2017 and $14 million to construct a taller and stronger fence around the White House. In a win for congressional Democrats concerned about Secret Service agents protecting Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump on overseas business trips, the bill includes language requiring an annual report on travel costs for people protected by the service — including the adult children of presidents.

Restaurant tips: In December, the Labor Department proposed a rule that would allow employers such as restaurant owners to “pool” their employees’ tips and redistribute them as they saw fit — including, potentially, to themselves. That generated a bipartisan outcry, and the bill spells out explicitly in law that tip pooling is not permitted: “An employer may not keep tips received by its employees for any purposes, including allowing managers or supervisors to keep any portion of employees’ tips, regardless of whether or not the employer takes a tip credit.”

Yucca Mountain: The legislation blocks attempts by the Energy Department to restart a moribund nuclear storage program at the mountain in the Silver State. Former Senate majority leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) was a fierce opponent of the measure. Sens. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) — the most embattled GOP incumbent up for reelection this year — and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) proved that they, too, can stop a federal program that is widely unpopular in their state from starting again.

FBI: The spending bill grants the agency $9.03 billion for salaries and expenses, a $263 million jump over the last fiscal year and $307 million more than the Trump administration requested. The bill does not include any funding for the construction of a new FBI headquarters, a win for Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. According to aides familiar with the move, the senator sought to block new construction funding in response to the administration’s plans to keep the FBI headquarters in downtown Washington instead of moving it to suburban Virginia or Maryland.

Asian carp: The invasive species has wreaked havoc on the Great Lakes, and lawmakers from states bordering the lakes touted language that forces the Army Corps of Engineers to keep working on ensuring that vessels in the Illinois River don’t carry the carp across an electric field erected to keep them out of the lakes.

Apprenticeships: Federal money for apprenticeship programs will increase by $50 million, and there’s a $75 million increase for career and technical education programs. The office of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) noted that other job training and “workforce development” programs also stand to benefit, including “more money for child care and early head start programs to help make it easier for job seekers to enter or return to the workforce.” This has been an area of concern for former “Apprentice” star Ivanka Trump.

rts: Federal funding for the arts goes up, despite GOP attempts to slash it. The National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities will see funding climb to $152.8 million each, a $3 million increase over the last fiscal year. Trump proposed eliminating the endowments. The National Gallery of Art gets $165.9 million, a $1.04 million jump in funding. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will receive $40.5 million, which is $4 million more than the last fiscal year.

Public broadcasting: Big Bird, “Antiques Roadshow” and “Masterpiece Theatre” can play on as lawmakers agreed not to cut funding for the nation’s public television and radio networks. Government funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will remain at $465 million — the same level as past years. PBS and NPR draw most of their funding directly from member stations and viewers like you.

Extenders: The bill reauthorizes key Federal Aviation Administration programs through the end of September and extends the National Flood Insurance Program through the end of July.