The Morning Briefing: Obama Admin Put Some Spies on Trump Campaign Aide

Good Friday morning.

Here is what’s on the president’s agenda today:

The president has lunch with the secretary of State
President Trump meets with the prime minister of the Slovak Republic
The president participates in an expanded bilateral meeting with the prime minister of the Slovak Republic

Are you worried about campaigns working with foreign countries for political assistance? Have I got a story for you!

From John Solomon at The Hill:

In its most detailed account yet, Ukraine’s embassy in Washington says a Democratic National Committee insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and even tried to enlist the country’s president to help.

In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly’s office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort’s dealings inside the country, in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.

“She said the DNC wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort were Russian assets, working to hurt the U.S. and working with Putin against the U.S. interests. She indicated if we could find the evidence they would introduce it in Congress in September and try to build a case that Trump should be removed from the ballot, from the election,” he recalled.

Go read the whole thing.

!Panic!: New York Times admits “FBI” spied on Trump

My, my, my.

The New York Times reported yesterday that the Obama administration sent an “investigator posing as assistant” or a “SPY” to meet with a Trump aide during the campaign. People must be very, very nervous to enlist the NYT to spin this small element of what will be coming out with the upcoming Inspector General Michael Horowitz report on agency abuses.

“The F.B.I. sent her to London as part of the counterintelligence inquiry opened that summer to better understand the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.”

Interesting: a foreigner sent on a counterintelligence operation to a foreign country for information-gathering purposes. What does that sound like to you? Not the work of the FBI.

https://twitter.com/StarChamberMaid/status/1124024334325039105

I linked the article above. There’s a ton of spin in it, so put on your deep state boots before reading. George Papadopoulos, the Trump aide in question, already revealed this information, but it was ignored by the media. PapaD appeared on Tucker Carlson last night to talk about the Times story.

“I received an unsolicited email in September of 2016 from a man who was suggesting that he wanted to pay me $3,000 to write a report on energy security questions and I was an expert on it at the time and Israel, Turkey and Cyprus,” the aide said. “I looked him up because I’d never heard of him. I saw that he had worked in four administrations and he was a professor at Cambridge so accepted his offer and he flew me to London where he paid for my five-star hotel and he said before I meet with you I want you to meet my assistant.”

“I right away understood this wasn’t a Cambridge assistant and she barely spoke English and she was very flirty and was trying to do two things, want to extract information about my professional connections in the Middle East and two to see if I had any information that she could potentially extract from meat on a Trump Russia which is nonsense. After I met with her she then is introduced to me again the next day where she goes from this suggestive young lady who now pouring his coffee and stuff on him is very belligerent,” he continued.

“From that moment I knew there was something wrong and I was laughing about it but now of course ‘The New York Times’ reported that she was some sort of agent but I don’t think she was FBI, I think she was CIA,” he concluded.

CIA, you say? Why, that would be cable news star John Brennan.

Barr doesn’t show up for clown-hearing, Democrats eat chicken

As promised, A.G. Barr did not show up on Thursday to the Democrat-run House Judiciary hearing. Barr offered to appear before lawmakers after he released the Mueller report, but the Democrats wanted to have the committee’s lawyers cross-examine the A.G. so they could use the optics of putting Barr on trial to their advantage. Barr was not interested in that setup.

In a bizarre and juvenile move, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) called the A.G. names like “chicken.” Then Cohen actually ate some chicken. What the hell is going on here? These are not serious people. They are completely bonkers.

Nadler, the committee’s chairman, has floated a contempt citation and a subpoena for Barr. We’ll see.

Mueller’s Sudden Concern Over ‘Public Confusion’ Glaringly Absent For 22 Previous Months

Klobuchar asks Mueller whether he reviewed Trump’s taxes

Trump tells Dems ‘it’s over,’ says McGahn won’t testify

Pressure grows for Mueller to speak

Oh. Support for impeachment craters: Now at 29/66 in new Quinnipiac poll

Pelosi says Barr lied

The Democrat #resistance continued yesterday when the speaker of the House announced that A.G. Barr had lied during a House Appropriation Committee hearing. Pelosi was referring to this exchange:

Crist: Reports have emerged recently, general, that members of the special counsel’s team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included with your March 24th letter, uh that it does not adequately or accurately necessarily portray the report’s findings. Do you know what they are referencing?

Barr: No I don’t. I think, I suspect that they probably wanted, you know, more put out, but in my view, I was not interested in putting out summaries or trying to summarize because I think any summary regardless of who prepares it not only runs the risk of, you know, being under-inclusive or over-inclusive but also would trigger a lot of discussion and analysis that really should await everything coming out at once. So I was not interested in a summary, uh, of the report and, in fact, at the time I put out my March 24th letter, there was nothing from the special counsel that wasn’t marked as potentially containing 6e material and I had no material that had been sanitized of 6e material, so I, uh, felt that I should state the bottom line conclusions, uh, and I tried to use special counsel Mueller’s own language in doing that.

Transcription my own.

“We saw [Barr] commit a crime when he answered your question,” Pelosi told Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) during a private caucus meeting Thursday morning, according to two sources present for the gathering.

“He lied to Congress. He lied to Congress,” Pelosi said soon after at a news conference. “And if anybody else did that, it would be considered a crime. Nobody is above the law. Not the president of the United States, and not the attorney general.”

Did he lie or is Pelosi grandstanding? Why do the Democrats care so much about this letter? The entire report is out with very limited redactions, so why such a big deal?

As I wrote yesterday, if Mueller’s witch hunters didn’t like how Barr rolled out the report, that’s too bad. Mueller worked for Barr and it’s Barr’s decision what to do with the report.

Other morsels:

Reporter: Biden Campaign Physically Blocking Press from Asking Questions

Poynter ‘Blacklist’ of Conservative News Sites Was Created by SPLC Employee

Attempted Self-Poisonings Up Sharply Among Teens

Baltimore mayor quits amid questions over $500,000 book deal

Rights groups sue over U.S. decision to hold asylum seekers without bond

San Francisco will spend $72 million on street cleaning this year, but it won’t be enough

Burger King introduces … the unhappy meal

Senate fails to override Trump’s Yemen veto

Florida bill banning sanctuary cities heads to governor’s desk

Trump Rolls Back Obama-Era Regulations On Offshore Drilling

Journalist Describes Police Not Intervening While Antifa Assaulted Him