FISA Applications Confirm: The FBI Relied on the Unverified Steele Dossier

FISA Applications Confirm: The FBI Relied on the Unverified Steele Dossier | National Review

A salacious Clinton-campaign product was the driving force behind the Trump-Russia investigation. On a sleepy summer Saturday, after months of stonewalling, the FBI dumped 412 pages of documents related to the Carter Page FISA surveillance warrants - the applications, the certifications, and the warrants themselves.

Unconstitutional ? No kidding

Andrew McCarthy on DOJ

News To You?

Justice Department Used Enemies List to Attack Critics, Including Me

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Via The Corner

"Notable Quotes"

“I cannot understand why the Department would not be eager to rebut the allegations made by Christian Adams. They should not wait to receive an invitation from the Commission. They should be eager to have this conversation. The allegation is devastating, if it’s true. And if I were over at the Department of Justice the first thing that I would want to do is just allay all concerns that there’s a policy in place, formal or otherwise, that the Department will not enforce the voting right to act against black defendants.”


Gerald Reynolds, Chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

Another Going-Away Party

Via-NRO

[Hans A. von Spakovsky]

I previously reported for National Review Online on the memorable going-away speech by Christopher Coates, the former career head of the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, who had been relieved of his post and “transferred” to South Carolina by the division’s new political leadership. Coates’s frankness and willingness to call out those who had criticized him for trying to enforce the Voting Rights Act in a race-neutral manner surprised and shocked the other career lawyers in the section, particularly since such evenhandedness runs directly contrary to the unofficial enforcement directives issued by the Obama political appointees who currently run the division.

Last Thursday, there was another going-away party in the Voting Section, this time for Christian Adams, the second Obama-administration casualty of the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case. Adams was one of the lead career lawyers who worked on that case, as well as an earlier case in Noxubee County, Miss., that infuriated the radical civil-rights establishment and their ideological soulmates who occupy nearly every nook and cranny in the section. The latter case, U.S. v. Ike Brown, was the lawsuit that DOJ won against local Mississippi election officials and the head of the county Democratic party for engaging in blatant discrimination against whites voters (and black voters who supported white candidates). Brown was the local equivalent of Boss Tweed, and his own Tammany Hall–style organization ran the county until the Voting Section team led by Coates and Adams put a stop to it.

Adams recently submitted a letter of resignation expressing his disgust over “the events surrounding the dismissal” of the voter-intimidation lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party, including the testimony by Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Perez avoided answering any substantive questions in his testimony and refused to respond when he was asked why the Justice Department would not appoint a special counsel to enforce the commission’s subpoena for witness testimony and documents about the politically motivated dismissal of the New Black Panther Party case.

At last week’s party for Adams, both the current section chief and the deputy chief praised Adams for his extraordinary productivity and consistently hard work. One of the other career lawyers also read an e-mail sent by Chris Coates. Below is the essence of what that e-mail said, from a source (not the brave career lawyer who read it). Keep in mind that many of the most militant partisans (who masquerade as career civil servant attorneys) were in the Voting Section conference room, people like Bob Berman, Brian Heffernan, Bert Russ, Autumn Payne, and Judith Reed. I am told that it was quite a spectacle. Here are Coates’s words provided to me by a source at the division: