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Grassley And Johnson Request FBI Director Wray Turn Over All FBI Records On Crossfire Hurricane

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Two powerful GOP Senators sent a letter Thursday to FBI Director Christopher Wray requesting all the records from the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team, which investigated the now debunked theory that President Donald Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia during the 2016 election.

Sen. Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who have been investigating the circumstances surrounding the FBI’s investigation and alleged malfeasance in obtaining Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Warrants to spy on then Trump campaign official Carter Page, made the request in a letter.

The senators stated in the letter that “on January 28, 2020, we wrote to Attorney General Barr and requested the declassification of four footnotes in the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

“Since then, we received declassified versions of those and other footnotes, and they reveal disturbing facts about the FBI’s investigation: the Crossfire Hurricane team’s investigative file included at least two intelligence reports stating that key parts of the reporting from Christopher Steele—reporting that “played a central and essential role” in the decision to request FISA orders —were part of a Russian disinformation campaign,” the pair added.

The Senator’s noted that the information in the now-declassified footnotes from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December report investigating the FBI’s probe into the Trump campaign “also directly contradicts statements provided by FBI officials in the OIG report.”

The footnotes revealed that former senior Obama officials, including members of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team knew the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele during the 2016 election was Russian disinformation to target Trump and his administration.

Further, those partially declassified footnotes reveal that those senior intelligence officials were aware of the disinformation when they included the dossier in the Obama administration’s Intelligence Communities Assessment (ICA).

Johnson and Grassley said they were “deeply troubled by the Crossfire Hurricane team’s awareness of and apparent indifference to Russian disinformation, as well as by the grossly inaccurate statements by the FBI official in charge of the investigation and its supervisory intelligence analyst.”

Further, the  recently declassified footnotes raise numerous other issues of “significant concern.”

“What other parts of the FBI’s investigation were infected by Russian disinformation? …The FBI knew that Russian intelligence was targeting Christopher Steele’s company, that Steele relied on sources affiliated with Russian intelligence, and at least two of Steele’s reports were described as the product of a Russian disinformation campaign. Because these facts show the intention, means, and ability to plant Russian disinformation in Steele’s reporting, they suggest that the prevalence of such disinformation in the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation may have been widespread.”

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Nation

Organization Launches Campaign to Spin Immigration Narrative by Suppressing Free Speech

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Billionaire Lauren Powell Jobs is fighting “immigration misinformation” through her new group Catalyze/Citizens by seeking to suppress mainstream public criticism of Extraction Migration policies. According to Breitbart, Jobs is demanding changes be made to Internet law to allow her to do so, which would require an anti-free speech law from Congress or a major Supreme Court decision.

In a statement released on December 3, Catalyze/Citizens said that Section 230 of the [Internet-related] Communications Decency Act would need to be reformed to allow the group to “counter far-right disinformation campaigns” and “build safer online spaces and AI technology.”

“Through these efforts, C/C aims to champion and elect pro-immigrant leaders, mobilize uncommon allies, and drive narrative interventions that protect immigrant communities and strengthen democratic values,” the statement added.

According to Breitbart:

“The group’s blame-the-narrative campaign echoes the view of many pro-migration groups that Donald Trump won the election by manipulating the voters via distorted media reports. That claim sidelines the evidence that voters recognize the vast economic and civic damage caused by the elite-driven desire for the extraction of many more foreign blue-collar and white-collar workers, renters, and consumers from poor countries.”

Andrea Flores, the chief lobbyist at Mark Zuckberg’s FWD.us pro-migration group, suggested that President Joe Biden take the blame for not spreading a “pro-migration narrative” enough, which allowed the campaign of now President-elect Donald Trump to succeed with their reports on the border crisis and the snowball effect it had on multiple aspects of American life including on businesses, housing, crime and security overall.

Catalyze/Citizens is an extension of Jobs’ Immigration Hub group and is to be headed by Beatriz Lopez who backed the mission to “tackle the source of disinformation by championing policies and solutions that ensure social media responsibility and online and AI safety.”

Each proponent cited discussing the mission of Catalyze/Citizens appears to consistently reference the need to address “dangerous online disinformation.” It is noteworthy that social media companies have come under scrutiny for their information policing of users, which critics argue hamper First Amendment rights.

The group Catalyze/Citizens also pointed out that Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign failed to focus on immigration policies and frame them in a favorable light. A report released by the group shows that Trump, on the other hand, focused largely on immigration spending millions to “frame immigration as a national threat.”

According to Breitbart, the Extraction Migration policy championed by Jobs and criticized by Trump can be explained as follows:

“The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The additional workers, white-collar graduates, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices.”

Breitbart adds, “The little-recognized economic policy has loosened the economic and civic feedback signals that animate a stable economy and democracy. It has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, reduced Americans’ productivity and political clout, slowed high-tech innovation, shrunk trade, crippled civic solidarity, and incentivized government officials and progressives to ignore the rising death rate of discarded, low-status Americans.”

President-elect Donald Trump recognized the implications of this policy, and has worked hard to warn Americans against it. In an effort to defend the policy however, supporters of it are calling Trump’s efforts “narrative trickery,” which led to the development of Catalyze/Citizens. If able, progressives see that the solution is in shifting the narrative by targeting speech critical of the policy.

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