How the FBI Conceals Its Payments to Confidential Sources

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/how-the-fbi-conceals-its-payments-to-confidential-sources/

A classified policy guide creates opportunities for agents to disguise payments as reimbursements or offer informants a cut of seized assets.

For the first time, we can now point to an internal government document that provides the framework for how informants are paid.

The FBI’s Confidential Human Source Policy Guide, a nearly 200-page manual classified secret and obtained by The Intercept, describes how payments to FBI informants are accounted for and authorized and how these payments can quickly become serious money.

The picture that emerges is of an approach that borrows some of the sophistication of modern banking. The bureau has devised a variety of ways to pay informants, including directly, before or after trial; via reimbursements; and through a cut of asset forfeitures.

A special agent-in-charge has the authority to pay each of his office’s informants up to $100,000 per fiscal year. However, informants may earn substantially more as long as each additional $100,000 is approved by successively higher levels within the bureau. With deputy director approval, according to the policy guide, an informant may earn more than $500,000 per year.

In addition to compensation, an informant may be eligible for 25 percent of the net value of any property forfeited as a result of the investigation, up to $500,000 per asset, according to the guide. This can be a particularly lucrative benefit for drug informants, whose cases sometimes result in the forfeiture of planes, boats, cars, and real estate.

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Trump Goes Beyond Cronyism—To Something Far Worse

William Barr Accidentally Concedes His Reason for Withholding the Mueller Report Is Baloney

Barr showed how hollow his position of withholding the full report from Congress is.

Trump has Barr and his Daddy had Roy Cohn and see Once a long time ago we  had Leon Jaworski.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/04/william-barr-testimony-mueller-report-baloney-watergate.html

Barr: I don’t know if it would be unprecedented since I’m not really sure what happened in the Watergate situation. I know the report came out 50 years later, I think. – what a smart mouth answer!! who wants to tolerate that!!

And Barr, noted the perfect precedent:
Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski’s cooperation and sharing of confidential grand jury materials with the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate inquiry.

In that case, which Barr brought up, a “Road Map” for impeachment from the Watergate grand jury itself was released publicly last October after 44 years of being sealed by the court.

However, that Road Map—with all of the secret grand jury material that it included—was sent at the time of the Watergate investigation directly to Congress for consideration.

How we got the Imperial Presidency

By naming people such as Herman Cain and Stephen Moore to top jobs, Trump converts the machinery of government to his personal use.

Donald Trump’s administration, however, has transcended cronyism and declared a war on expertise, in which unbiased knowledge is itself somehow politically suspect if it does not accord with President Trump’s beliefs and assertions—and especially if it conflicts with his personal interests. In this administration, complicated issues are not problems to be solved or tasks to be administered for the public good, but threats to be hammered down by alert sycophants. As the Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro once put it: “My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.”

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/moore-and-cain-nominations-reach-new-level-cronyism/586831/

Former top prosecutor: Trump ‘effectively’ named co-conspirator

The previous US lawyer in control of the Southern District of New York federal prosecutor’s administrative center has instructed Sky Information, in his view, that the administrative center has “successfully” named Donald Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal offense.

Preet Bharara used to be regarding a sentencing memo written by way of prosecutors about Michael Cohen, the president’s former non-public legal professional.

“In testy exchange, Rep. Maxine Waters tells Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, “no other secretary has ever told us the day before that they were going to limit their time.” “You’re ordering me to stay here …. that’s not what I want to do,” Mnuchin says 

Why Mar-a-Lago is a counterintelligence nightmare

Imagine that the White House, instead of a fortress, were an opulent country club.

If you pony up a US$200,000 nonrefundable initiation fee, you can have the run of the place.

Wander the halls. Drop in any time on the West Wing, the Oval Office, the Situation Room.

Chat freely with the US President’s family and advisers, listen in on national security conversations with foreign leaders, even snap a selfie with POTUS himself.

Take it all in – actually, feel free to record it if you like.

Welcome to the Mar-a-Lago club, known in US President Donald Trump’s circles as the winter White House, in Palm Beach, Florida.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12221320