“Oh, what a tangled web we weave…”

FoxNews.com reports that

As part of its ongoing “multifaceted” and “broad” review into potential misconduct by U.S. intelligence agencies during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Justice Department revealed Monday it is also investigating the activities of several “non-governmental organizations and individuals.”

Additionally, the DOJ announced that the probe, let by Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, was looking into the involvement of “foreign intelligence services.” Former Trump aide George Papadopoulos told Fox News last month that an informant who was likely “CIA and affiliated with Turkish intel” had posed as a Cambridge University research assistant in September 2016 and tried to “seduce him” to obtain information linking the Trump team to Russia.

The information was contained in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., who had inquired as to the scope of Durham’s investigation. The letter could indicate that the DOJ is looking closely at work done during the campaign by Fusion GPS, the firm retained by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee (DNC) to conduct opposition research against the Trump campaign.

Fusion GPS, in turn, hired British ex-spy Christopher Steele to produce an unverified and largely discredited dossier that the FBI went on to cite in secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court applications to surveil former Trump aide Carter Page.

Last week, reports indicated Steele had agreed to talk with Durham if certain preconditions were met. Multiple sources familiar with the matter told Fox News, meanwhile, that Durham is “very dialed in” and “asking all the right questions.” Separately, sources within the Justice Department confirmed to Fox News that Barr has met “on multiple occasions in recent weeks” with Durham in Washington, D.C.

Numerous problems with the Steele dossier’s reliability have surfaced, including several issues that were brought to the FBI’s attention before it cited the dossier in its FISA application and subsequent renewals. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report made plain, for example, that then-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen did not travel to Prague to conspire with Russian hackers seeking to access Democrat files, as the dossier alleged.

Mueller also was unable to substantiate the dossier’s claims that Page had received a large payment relating to the sale of a share of Rosneft, a Russian oil giant.

North Carolina GOP Rep. Mark Meadows told Fox News on Sunday he has seen “additional documents” that demonstrate that “prior to the first FISA application, Peter Strzok, Andy McCabe, and others at the FBI knew that Christopher Steele’s dossier was not credible.” Internal FBI text messages obtained by Fox News in March showed FBI brass scrambling to respond to a concern from a senior DOJ official about the potential “bias” of a key FISA source.

Meadows, speaking to “Fox News Sunday,” pointed specifically to a report from The Hill’s John Solomon, who found that Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, a key figure in Mueller’s report, was actually a U.S. informant. In his report, Mueller linked Kilimnik to Russian intelligence, and did not mention Kilimnik’s secretive ties to the U.S. in the report other court filings — even as Mueller suggested former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s ties to Kilimnik were nefarious.

“The deeper the dive we take into the Mueller report, we’re starting to find out some of the conclusions, and actually some of the facts they put forth in there, are a misrepresentation of what we actually know,” Meadows said.

Meadows added that he expected DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigation into potential FBI and DOJ surveillance misconduct to come out later than June, when it was originally expected. Meadows said more information has come to light that might necessitate the delay.

Speaking of investigating individuals, did you know that there was a second FISA Dossier?

In February of 2018, Judicial Watch reported that

The strange case of the Russian dossier got even stranger this week with a new report from the Guardian raising a name from the seamy side of Clinton past. A “second Trump-Russia dossier” has been turned over to the FBI, the Guardian reported. The second dossier was compiled by Cody Shearer, who the Guardian identifies as a “a controversial political activist and former journalist who was close to the Clinton White House in the 1990s.”

That’s putting it mildly. Shearer in fact has long been linked to the sleaziest aspects of the Clinton operation, mainly through his close relationship with Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal. Longtime observers of the Clinton ecosystem know that when Cody appears, Sid Blumenthal is not far behind. A ceaseless schemer, Blumenthal was so offensive to the Obama White House that he was banned from an official role at Mrs. Clinton’s State Department. But that barely slowed him down. As documented by Judicial Watch and others, Blumenthal was a constant presence by Mrs. Clinton’s side during her State Department years.

Blumenthal and Shearer are connected to a global network of intelligence and military freelancers. They played a dangerous game meddling in Libyan affairs after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. They supplied intelligence to Secretary of State Clinton in the weeks leading up to the Benghazi debacle and pitched deals to make money off the Libyan turmoil. ProPublica reports at length on the Blumenthal and Shearer’s Libyan efforts here. According to Judicial Watch’s reporting, during Mrs. Clinton’s State Department tenure, Blumenthal also promoted African business deals and meddled in European Union elections.

As for Shearer, he has a long history of dirty tricks. He’s been linked to Whitewater-era efforts to dirty up Bill Clinton critics; to shakedown politics involving the Cheyenne-Arapaho Indian tribe; and to fronting for Bosnian Serb butcher Radovan Karadzic. Read more about it here and here.

The Guardian reports that the new Shearer document makes some of the same allegations about Mr. Trump as the original Christopher Steele dossier, including “lewd acts at a five-star hotel” in Moscow. It also notes that Steele passed on the Shearer report to the FBI in October 2016, but would not vouch for its accuracy. That’s worth pausing over.

According to the Guardian, Steele provided “a copy [of the Shearer report] because it corresponded with what he had separately heard from his own independent sources.” If the reporting here is accurate, that’s quite a coincidence—that Cody Shearer and Christopher Steele were hearing the same things from different sources at pretty much the same time. A closer look at timelines and sources might be revealing. If Sid and Cody are behind the original Russian dossier sources, that would be big news indeed.

Let’s look at these two characters a little bit closer, shall we?

Sidney Blumenthal (courtesy discoverthenetworks.org)

In 2007-08, Blumenthal served as an adviser for Hillary Clinton’s presidential primary campaign against fellow Democrat Barack Obama. Though Obama ultimately emerged victorious, the campaign’s heated rhetoric left the president-elect and his allies bitter and angry at Blumenthal, whom they viewed as the Clinton camp’s primary smear merchant. According to Occidental College professor Peter Dreier, Blumenthal in 2008 regularly distributed e-mails attacking “Obama’s character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations.” In addition, Blumenthal also promoted the rumor that a highly inflammatory “whitey

tape” existed of either Barack or Michelle Obama derisively referring to white people as “whitey”—something that, had the tape ever materialized, would clearly have been toxic to the Obama campaign.

In September 2016, Blumenthal’s name made headlines when it was reported that he may have had a hand in promoting the rumor that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and thus was ineligible for the U.S. presidency. On September 16, former McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher tweeted that Blumenthal had “told me in person” that Obama’s birthplace was Kenya. “During the 2008 Democratic primary, Sid Blumenthal visited the Washington Bureau of McClatchy Co.,” Asher said in an email to McClatchy that same day. “During that meeting, Mr. Blumenthal and I met together in my office and he strongly urged me to investigate the exact place of President Obama’s birth, which he suggested was in Kenya. We assigned a reporter to go to Kenya, and that reporter determined that the allegation was false. At the time of Mr. Blumenthal’s conversation with me, there had been a few news articles published in various outlets reporting on rumors about Obama’s birthplace. While Mr. Blumenthal offered no concrete proof of Obama’s Kenyan birth, I felt that, as journalists, we had a responsibility to determine whether or not those rumors were true. They were not.” In response to this story, Blumenthal said in an email to The Boston Globe: “This is false. Period.”

That same day — September 16, 2016 — former CIA analyst and Clinton loyalist Larry C. Johnson said that he was “shocked at the audacity of Hillary Clinton to decry [2016 Republican presidential candidate] Donald Trump as a birther because her campaign not only pushed that item in a bid to discredit Barack Obama, but mounted a sustained campaign attack Obama on a broad array of issues.” Added Johnson: “How do I know? I was part of that effort and was in regular email and phone coordination with Sidney Blumenthal. Sidney was the conduit who fed damaging material to me that I subsequently posted on my blog. In some cases Sid Blumenthal actually provided a draft piece that I would slightly modify and publish under my name. Most of the time, however, Sid provided background information and researched material that I would use to craft pieces…. [This included] information concerning allegations that Barack Obama was not a natural born citizen…. Listening to Hillary Clinton cry crocodile tears over Trump’s [previous] questioning Obama’s birth place and eligibility to be President … as a ‘racist’ attack is the ultimate example that Hillary is cynical and dishonest. Yes, it is true that the words, ‘Obama is a [M]uslim’ or ‘Obama is not a natural born American’ never passed her lips. But it is also true that people very close to her, such as Sidney Blumenthal, were pushing those stories and trying desperately to promote those memes. Hillary knew about all of these lines of attack on Obama. In fact I was told by Sid on one occasion in the summer of 2008 that the Big Dog (Bill of course) was very pleased with the pieces going up at NoQuarterUSA [Johnson’s website] and thought they were helping Hillary.”

A week later, Johnson elaborated further: “I know firsthand, and can testify under oath, that Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign was hot and heavy on the issue of Barack Obama’s [M]uslim heritage. How do I know? Because I was a conduit for information from Sidney Blumenthal, a Hillary Clinton confidant. I was not an official part of the campaign. I was not on the staff. But I was a supporter and I have no regrets for trying to help Hillary defeat Barack Obama.”
When President Obama eventually named Hillary Clinton as his choice for secretary of state in 2009, Mrs. Clinton reportedly wanted to offer a State Department job to Blumenthal. But the White House adamantly refused to permit this. As a Vanity Fair report explains: “President Obama would not allow it: key White House staffers had grown to detest the man. Two of them—Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Senior Adviser David Axelrod—threatened to quit if Blumenthal was hired. They believed that he had been involved in spreading unsubstantiated allegations against the Obamas during the 2008 Democratic primary, as detailed in the campaign chronicle Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.”

Having thus been denied an official position in the new administration, Blumenthal was subsequently hired by Mrs. Clinton’s family philanthropy—the Bill, Hillary, & Chelsea Clinton Foundation—to help with such tasks as research, “message guidance,” and the planning of commemorative events. Meanwhile, he also worked as a paid consultant to Media Matters For America and American Bridge 21st Century, pro-Clinton organizations that were both established by left-wing activist David Brock.

A sweetheart of a guy, huh?

Hold on, gentle readers.

As Al Jolson used to say,

Wait a minute, folks! You ain’t seen nothin’, yet!

And you thought Sidney Blumenthal was shady.

Cody Shearer (courtesy nationalreview.com, June 1, 2015)

Few people have heard of Cody Shearer, the unsanctioned diplomat, private eye, and Clinton flunky whose name surfaced in connection with the so-called intelligence reports Sidney Blumenthal was channeling to Hillary Clinton during her time at the State Department. But this shadowy fixture of the Clinton machine was everywhere in the 1990s — including war-torn Bosnia, where he became the subject of a State Department investigation after he represented himself as an agent of the U.S. government and took cash from a genocidal warlord.

Now evidence suggests Shearer, working with his partner Blumenthal, was up to something similar during the 2011 revolution in Libya. And like in the 1990s, the Clintons were lurking on the margins. Much of the intelligence contained in memos fed to the Clinton State Department by Blumenthal was not just self-serving — it was provided by someone with a history of misleading foreign sources, misrepresenting himself as an agent of the U.S. government, and creating trouble for both himself and the United States abroad.

Though often described as a journalist, Shearer hasn’t written much since the 1980s. His work, like that of his father, Lloyd Shearer, the former editor of Parade magazine, was often gossipy and reputation-ruining. A series of columns the younger Shearer wrote on the sexual proclivities of former Texas senator John Tower sank his nomination for defense secretary in 1989.

Shearer’s career took a strange turn when the Clintons entered the White House in 1992. His entrée into the first family’s orbit was Strobe Talbott, Shearer’s brother-in-law, who had been a friend of Bill Clinton since the president’s days at Oxford. Talbott served as a deputy secretary in Bill Clinton’s State Department; his brother-in-law took a different route, allegedly working with Clinton enforcer Terry Lenzner to investigate and, at times, intimidate women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment.

But Shearer’s political intrigues in the ’90s extended beyond U.S. shores. In the middle of the decade, for reasons that remain unclear, he traveled to Europe to negotiate with associates of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian-Serb president known to have orchestrated the mass killings of Bosnian Muslims — including the Srebrenica genocide — during the brutal Yugoslav Wars. Representing himself as an agent of the State Department, Shearer told his Serbian contacts, which included members of Karadzic’s family, that he could reduce the severity of impending war-crimes charges if Karadzic surrendered. He claimed he was in contact not only with his brother-in-law, but also with then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright and even with President Clinton himself.

“He said, ‘If you can show to my friends, meaning his brother-in-law and the president, that you can offer a serious line of negotiation, military action to capture Karadzic would not happen,’” the Serbian associate said, according to a 1999 Wall Street Journal article. A subsequent State Department investigation found that the Serbs paid Shearer at least $25,000 for his efforts, though the Serbs themselves claim he was paid much more.

Although Shearer’s negotiations on behalf of the U.S. government were unauthorized, the Wall Street Journal reported that Strobe Talbott knew of his brother-in-law’s activities at least one year before the State Department did and asked him to stop. He only felt compelled to do so, according to the Journal, because Shearer was erroneously informing his Serbian contacts that the U.S. supported a plan to partition Bosnia, not because he was conducting shadow diplomacy with a genocidal warlord.

David Bossie, now the president of the conservative political-action committee Citizens United, first uncovered Shearer’s role in the Bosnia negotiations as a GOP researcher on the House Oversight Committee in the 1990s. The State Department’s inspector general opened an investigation into Shearer’s actions in 1999, but it was never publicly released. “It was just one of those things that fell by the wayside,” says Bossie. “And then the Clintons leave office and it’s all forgotten.” Citizens United is now asking the State Department to release the investigation’s results.

Fast-forward 14 years and, in early 2011, as a State Department-sanctioned revolution against the Qaddafi regime in Libya was picking up steam, longtime Clinton consigliere Sidney Blumenthal was sending “confidential” intelligence memos to Hillary Clinton. He was touting leaders of the Libyan rebel movement with whom he had business dealings and pushing for the hire of private military contractors while working as an adviser to Osprey Global Solutions, a contracting company seeking to do business in Libya.

Shearer was aiding Blumenthal in these “intelligence-gathering” efforts. In one e-mail message from May 2011, first published by Gawker in March, Shearer appears to be serving as the liaison between Blumenthal and “Grange,” the former Army general and CEO of Osprey, as they attempt to organize a small team of contractors to conduct an unspecified mission to the Libyan border from Tunisia. He is also in frequent contact with “K,” a Libyan named Khalifa al Sherif who seems to be feeding Shearer intelligence reports from inside the Libyan revolutionary council.

It’s not clear to what extent Clinton knew she was involving herself with Shearer — National Review was unable to contact Shearer, and the Clinton campaign did not reply to a request for comment.

Bossie says the House Select Committee on Benghazi has been notified of Shearer’s past indiscretions in Bosnia and believes that history will prove instructive as to what he was up to in Libya — and on whose behalf.

Thanks to the passage of time, we now know to what extent Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was involved with Cody Shearer.

They were as thick as a pair of Jackals eyeing a rotting animal carcass.

So, there you have the comedy team of Sid and Cody, covert henchmen for Hillary Clinton, evidently acting as a two-man SWAT Team, dealing with Clinton enemies, foreign and domestic.

What is amazing to me, and I trust to you as well, is the fact that Blumenthal not only worked for the Puppet Master, George Soros, but for the Clintons and their money-laundering Foundation, as well.

With both Blumenthal and Shearer acting covertly in Libya at the behest of Secretary Clinton, it stands to reason, if you connect the dots, do the math, or just exercise some common sense, that they put together the Second Dossier with her full knowledge of their actions.

I don’t know about you, gentle readers, but I would love to witness an interrogation of the Former Secretary of State and 2016 Democrat Presidential Candidate under oath, being asked about her knowledge of “Spygate”.

Hillary would probably have another “accident” and show up wearing her “Coke Bottle” glasses again in order to receive sympathy.

And, what about her Former Boss, Barack Hussein Obama?

If you believe that he did not know about all of these covert operations being run by the State Department, the DOJ, and the FBI, I have two bridges over the Mississippi River at Memphis, Tennessee to sell you.

Another key ingredient in this whole bloody mess is the fact that Blumenthal worked for George Soros before during and after writing the Second Dossier.

How heavily involved was Soros in this treasonous plot to overthrow the will of the American People?

Soros is certainly not above being involved in a plot to keep Trump from becoming President.

He pointed out his own neighbors to the Nazis.

He’s not above anything.

The desperation of all of these “bad actors” in this Machiavellian Plan would be funny after the results of the 2016 President Election…if they were not so treasonous.

I believe that it is time for a Final Act in this attempted Shakespearean Tragedy.

Since good triumphed over evil on November 8, 2016, it is time for an epilogue featuring a frog march of Federal Prisoners in Orange Jumpsuits, with Hillary and Obama leading all of their Deep State Covert Operatives out of a courtroom and into a waiting Prisoner Transport Van headed to the nearest Federal Prison.

I can’t wait for the results of the investigations of Inspector General Horowitz and Attorney General Barr.

I love a happy ending.

Until He Comes,

KJ