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As Democrats mull how far to push the impeachment envelope against President Trump after Robert Mueller found no evidence of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election but punted on obstruction of justice charges, another investigation could further blunt their attempts to oust the president from office or damage his re-election chances.
Amid calls from Trump and his supporters to “investigate the investigators,” Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has been hard at work over the last year looking into the sources and methods the FBI used to begin surveillance of a one-time Trump campaign adviser based at least in part on discredited information gathered by a former British spy.
That packet of intelligence, known as the “Steele dossier,” contains salacious and unsubstantiated details about Trump’s alleged romps with Russian prostitutes, along with business and political quid pro quos with Russian officials.
Attorney General Robert Barr said the inspector general is wrapping up his probe and could release a final report as early as next month.
Those interviewed by Horowitz and his team over the past year, according to Politico, say he seems intensely focused on undermining the dossier and credibility of Christopher Steele, the former British MI6 agent who produced the document. Steele had served as a confidential source for the FBI since 2010 until a falling out over his leaks to the media about the Trump-Russia probe.
While prominent Democrats have accused Mueller of failing to do his duty and Barr of prioritizing the interests of Trump over the American people, they’ll have a more difficult time assailing Horowitz, a Harvard-educated lawyer appointed by President Obama to the DoJ’s top watchdog post in 2012.
Horowitz, who was a partner in New York City’s oldest law firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, before becoming inspector general, served as a board member of the Ethics Resource Center and the Society of Corporate Compliance Ethics.
He began his career at the Justice Department in the 1990s, serving as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, including stints as the chief of the public corruption unit. Before leaving in 2002, he worked as the deputy assistant attorney general of the criminal division and as its chief of staff.
Roughly a year ago, Horowitz also proved he’s willing to disappoint Trump and his supporters. He thoroughly investigated the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation and charges that the probe was rigged to let Clinton off the hook.
Horowitz amassed a mountain of embarrassing emails and electronic messages between former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and his co-worker and lover, Lisa Page, about their hatred for Trump and an “insurance plan” to derail his presidency. However, Horowitz concluded that he could not link the “appearance” of personal bias against Trump to “evidence that any political bias or improper considerations actually” impacted the way the FBI pursued the Clinton email probe.
He also harshly criticized then-FBI Director James Comey for his July 2016 announcement that he would not recommend any charges against Clinton, and his subsequent October 2016 decision to tell Congress that the FBI had discovered new emails and had re-opened the case.
Still, Horowitz concluded that Comey hadn’t acted out of political bias, but did “deviate” from established procedures and engaged “in his own subjective, ad hoc decision making” in what the IG described as an extremely unusual case with high political stakes.
The stakes couldn’t be higher when it comes to Horowitz’ current probe. Steele was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS in 2016 to look into Trump’s Russia ties, and that work was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through a law firm.
Republican members of Congress and other Trump allies allege the only true collusion took place between the Clinton camp and the FBI, with Steele’s help. They accuse the DoJ and the FBI of abusing the FISA process and misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by relying on the dossier to obtain approvals for the surveillance without disclosing that the information was unverified or paid for by Democrats and the Clinton campaign itself.
Democrats counter that the FBI wouldn’t be doing its job if it hadn’t investigated Trump associates’ ties to Russia. For instance, the unpaid campaign adviser at the center of the FISA controversy, Carter Page, first attracted FBI attention back in 2013 when he interacted with undercover intelligence agents in New York City. Carter’s trip to Russia in the summer of 2016 sparked more scrutiny and justified the warrant the FBI submitted to in October 2016, they argue.
But Trump and his supporters have blasted the FBI for continuing to use the dossier to attain FISA court warrants even after Steele was terminated for unauthorized and potentially criminal leaks to the media.
Last January, then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham, who now helms that panel, referred Steele to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution for lying about his contacts with several media organizations before the 2016 election.
Rep. Jim Jordan, who serves as the ranking Republican member on the House Oversight Committee, on Saturday pointed to the dossier as the rationale used to launch an investigation “on a false premise.”
“You can’t have the FBI using one party’s opposition research document to launch an investigation and spy on the other party’s campaign,” he said.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, a conservative Republican from Florida, over the weekend said Horowitz has evidence that FBI officials received tickets to concerts and athletic events from members of the press as incentives to leak to them.
“One of the … nuggets that the inspector general is working on is the corruption that existed between the media and members of the FBI,” Gaetz said, without citing his sources for the information.
The American public, especially those on the right, are already highly skeptical of the mainstream media, whose credibility has continued to sink during its coverage of the Trump administration amid the president’s frequent charges of “fake news” and the media’s torrent of stories alleging Trump’s collusion with Russia.
A Morning Consult/Hollywood Reporter survey released earlier this month found that the share of adults who said some of the biggest media outlets – including ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, the New York Times, NPR and the Wall Street Journal – were credible dropped an average of 5 percentage points over the past three years, from 56% to 44%.
The media skepticism was predictably most pronounced among Republicans, whose responses show a 12-point drop in their trust in news outlets over the course of the last three years.
It also doesn’t help that the dossier first surfaced in the liberal media when BuzzFeed posted it online – complete with the lurid details of a sex tape featuring prostitutes that the Russian government was said to be holding over Trump. Mueller’s investigation found no evidence that such a tape existed. It also didn’t corroborate another dossier claim published in a McClatchy report that then-Trump attorney Michael Cohen met with Russian officials in Prague.
The Mueller report’s conclusions poked huge holes in the Democrats’ Trump-Russia narrative and sparked new questions about the way the FBI went about investigating it, as well as the media’s role in fanning its flames. Horowitz’ report will try to address both issues.
At the beginning of the Horowitz probe, House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler – who is weighing whether to begin impeachment proceedings against the president — said it’s a “shame” that the inspector general has to “devote resources to investigate a conspiracy theory as fact-free, openly political, and thoroughly debunked as the president’s do-called ‘FISA abuse.’”
As the probe is winding down, Steele himself appears less sanguine about Horowitz’ findings and conclusions. He has reportedly declined to be interviewed and plans to rebut the IG’s characterizations in a rare public statement.
The New York Times on Friday also reported that Steele never tried portray the dossier as anything other than raw intelligence — jumping off points for the FBI to begin investigating.
How that assertion squares with Horowitz’s findings will be closely watched by those on both sides of the aisle. But for Democrats eager to herald the Mueller report’s details on possible obstruction, the IG’s work could be tough to portray as just another government investigation biased in Trump’s favor.
Reps. Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan Friday argued that President Donald Trump couldn’t have obstructed justice, as his staffers did not carry out some of his more controversial requests.
The three men sparred on CNN’s “New Day,” when network anchor Chris Cuomo asked them during a joint interview about statements made in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report concerning Trump directing former counsel Don McGahn to take steps toward removing Mueller from the investigation.
“The president goes to Don McGahn and says, ‘you need to do this to stop this,’ and the guy has to threaten to resign or leave for it not to happen,” said Cuomo. “And you ignore it. I think that matters too.”
Jordan, R-Ohio, and Meadows, R-N.C., though, argued that because McGahn refused, that means there was no obstruction.
“Asking matters, Jim,” Cuomo told Jordan. “If I ask you to punch Mr. Meadows and you don’t do it, the request was still wrong.”
“Yeah, the request may have been wrong, but it’s not a crime unless he assaults me,” Meadows said.
Meanwhile, the investigation was biased from the beginning, Meadows insisted.
“You know, we had James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and then we had Bob Mueller coming into it, right after he gets turned down for a job as the FBI director,” Meadows said. “Somehow people forget that and so to suggest that there was no bias at the predicate of this investigation is not accurate and I think we will see that in the coming days.”
Jordan added that he does not agree with Trump’s contention that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election, but he does not think any collusion came into play.
Source: NewsMax Politics
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It’s almost as though the Mueller Report was written by Democrats for Democrats. Oh, wait — that’s exactly what it is! Which is why the left-wing media was so drunkenly exuberant on Thursday when the report was released.
The entire framework of the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was to buttress the Democratic argument that President Trump is an unqualified boob who doesn’t deserve to be president — and there is not even the slightest acknowledgement of the by-now blatantly obvious fact that Trump was the victim of a virtual coup.
Indeed, you cannot help but get the feeling that the Mueller Report is the death benefit of that “insurance policy” that Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and Andy McCabe took out way back in August 2016.
You will recall that FBI agent Strzok sent his Justice Department girlfriend Page a text message that hinted at nefarious Deep State involvement in the presidential election:
“I want to believe the path you threw out in Andy’s [McCabe’s] office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
Well, the “unlikely event” of Donald Trump being elected president happened, and therefore the insurance policy went into effect — namely the creation of a diversionary narrative of Russian collusion to weaken the new president and ultimately to overthrow him.
But somehow, Bob Mueller and his team of “Angry Democrats” were unable to penetrate this conspiracy in plain sight — perhaps because they were so busy being part of it.
On page 323 of the report, the special counsel acknowledges that he is aware of the origin of the Russia hoax because he quotes the president’s Aug. 24, 2018, tweet asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI agent Peter Strzok, Justice Department lawyer Lisa Page, DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and Christopher Steele and “his phony and corrupt Dossier.” But somehow neither Sessions, nor Mueller, nor anyone else has been able to put 2 + 2 together and come up with the correct answer.
Indeed, if you want to gauge the complete inadequacy of the Mueller Report, consider this: President Trump’s tweet is the only mention in the report of Ohr, whose wife worked for Fusion GPS, the firm behind the dossier. It is the only mention of Strzok. It is the only mention of Page. Considering their central role in framing the president, that is the equivalent of the Warren Report somehow relegating Lee Harvey Oswald to a single footnote.
The tweet is not the only mention of McCabe, because he had investigated National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and later became acting director of the FBI after the firing of James Comey, but there is no evidence that Mueller probed McCabe’s role with Strzok and Page in setting up the “insurance policy” that Strzok said was in place in case Trump got elected president.
The fact that there is no mention of Steele at all in Volume 1 of the report (which covers Russian interference in the 2016 election) is shocking since it was his unverified dossier that promoted the lie that the Russians had control of Trump because they possessed compromising material on the real estate tycoon. Steele’s participation with Russian sources is the most direct evidence of Russian interference in the election, but Mueller showed no interest in it because it implicated Democrats.
Volume 2 (which covers obstruction) does on page 235 acknowledge Steele’s existence as the source of what even Mueller calls the “unverified allegations” published by BuzzFeed in January 2017. It also notes on pages 239 and 240 that Director Comey briefed President-elect Trump on the phony dossier on Jan. 6, 2017, and that the briefing was subsequently leaked to the public.
Moreover, page 246 acknowledges that the president wanted the FBI to investigate Steele’s allegations on Jan. 27, 2017, but that Comey talked him out of it. If the president had gotten his wish, the entire Mueller investigation would never have taken place at all because it would have been quickly established that Steele was working at the behest of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Oh, yes, and Comey would have kept his job because he was working for the president instead of against him.
The mention of Steele on page 315 does prove that the Mueller team was well aware of allegations of a Democratic/Deep State plot against Trump but chose not to investigate it. This mention is in reference to the July 2017 reporting about the infamous Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and several Russians.
The New York Times quoted a statement from Trump legal spokesman Mark Corallo that the Trump Tower meeting “might have been a setup by individuals working with the firm that produced the Steele reporting.” If Mueller’s team knew this and still didn’t bother to investigate the suspicious circumstances of the meeting, then they have lost all credibility.
Most telling perhaps is that there is no direct reference to GPS Fusion in the entire report other than that anonymous reference by Corallo to “the firm that produced the Steele reporting.” Nor for that matter is there any reference to the Perkins Coie law firm that was the go-between that hired GPS Fusion on behalf of the DNC to generate the phony Steele dossier.
Clearly, the Mueller Report is the result of a one-sided investigation that did not seek to get at the truth, but only single-mindedly sought — if at all possible — to indict the president. This realization thoroughly vindicates attorney Alan Dershowitz, who has long said that to avoid a political outcome of the investigation, the country needed a bipartisan “blue ribbon panel” such as the 9/11 Commission.
It’s too late for that now, but if Attorney General William Barr has any intestinal fortitude (and I think he does) we will soon get a new investigation that exposes the partisan origins of the Russia hoax and asks many current and former federal officials, up to and including President Obama, “What did you know, and when did you know it.”
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It’s almost as though the Mueller Report was written by Democrats for Democrats. Oh, wait — that’s exactly what it is! Which is why the left-wing media was so drunkenly exuberant on Thursday when the report was released.
The entire framework of the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was to buttress the Democratic argument that President Trump is an unqualified boob who doesn’t deserve to be president — and there is not even the slightest acknowledgement of the by-now blatantly obvious fact that Trump was the victim of a virtual coup.
Indeed, you cannot help but get the feeling that the Mueller Report is the death benefit of that “insurance policy” that Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and Andy McCabe took out way back in August 2016.
You will recall that FBI agent Strzok sent his Justice Department girlfriend Page a text message that hinted at nefarious Deep State involvement in the presidential election:
“I want to believe the path you threw out in Andy’s [McCabe’s] office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
Well, the “unlikely event” of Donald Trump being elected president happened, and therefore the insurance policy went into effect — namely the creation of a diversionary narrative of Russian collusion to weaken the new president and ultimately to overthrow him.
But somehow, Bob Mueller and his team of “Angry Democrats” were unable to penetrate this conspiracy in plain sight — perhaps because they were so busy being part of it.
On page 323 of the report, the special counsel acknowledges that he is aware of the origin of the Russia hoax because he quotes the president’s Aug. 24, 2018, tweet asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI agent Peter Strzok, Justice Department lawyer Lisa Page, DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and Christopher Steele and “his phony and corrupt Dossier.” But somehow neither Sessions, nor Mueller, nor anyone else has been able to put 2 + 2 together and come up with the correct answer.
Indeed, if you want to gauge the complete inadequacy of the Mueller Report, consider this: President Trump’s tweet is the only mention in the report of Ohr, whose wife worked for Fusion GPS, the firm behind the dossier. It is the only mention of Strzok. It is the only mention of Page. Considering their central role in framing the president, that is the equivalent of the Warren Report somehow relegating Lee Harvey Oswald to a single footnote.
The tweet is not the only mention of McCabe, because he had investigated National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and later became acting director of the FBI after the firing of James Comey, but there is no evidence that Mueller probed McCabe’s role with Strzok and Page in setting up the “insurance policy” that Strzok said was in place in case Trump got elected president.
The fact that there is no mention of Steele at all in Volume 1 of the report (which covers Russian interference in the 2016 election) is shocking since it was his unverified dossier that promoted the lie that the Russians had control of Trump because they possessed compromising material on the real estate tycoon. Steele’s participation with Russian sources is the most direct evidence of Russian interference in the election, but Mueller showed no interest in it because it implicated Democrats.
Volume 2 (which covers obstruction) does on page 235 acknowledge Steele’s existence as the source of what even Mueller calls the “unverified allegations” published by BuzzFeed in January 2017. It also notes on pages 239 and 240 that Director Comey briefed President-elect Trump on the phony dossier on Jan. 6, 2017, and that the briefing was subsequently leaked to the public.
Moreover, page 246 acknowledges that the president wanted the FBI to investigate Steele’s allegations on Jan. 27, 2017, but that Comey talked him out of it. If the president had gotten his wish, the entire Mueller investigation would never have taken place at all because it would have been quickly established that Steele was working at the behest of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Oh, yes, and Comey would have kept his job because he was working for the president instead of against him.
The mention of Steele on page 315 does prove that the Mueller team was well aware of allegations of a Democratic/Deep State plot against Trump but chose not to investigate it. This mention is in reference to the July 2017 reporting about the infamous Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and several Russians.
The New York Times quoted a statement from Trump legal spokesman Mark Corallo that the Trump Tower meeting “might have been a setup by individuals working with the firm that produced the Steele reporting.” If Mueller’s team knew this and still didn’t bother to investigate the suspicious circumstances of the meeting, then they have lost all credibility.
Most telling perhaps is that there is no direct reference to GPS Fusion in the entire report other than that anonymous reference by Corallo to “the firm that produced the Steele reporting.” Nor for that matter is there any reference to the Perkins Coie law firm that was the go-between that hired GPS Fusion on behalf of the DNC to generate the phony Steele dossier.
Clearly, the Mueller Report is the result of a one-sided investigation that did not seek to get at the truth, but only single-mindedly sought — if at all possible — to indict the president. This realization thoroughly vindicates attorney Alan Dershowitz, who has long said that to avoid a political outcome of the investigation, the country needed a bipartisan “blue ribbon panel” such as the 9/11 Commission.
It’s too late for that now, but if Attorney General William Barr has any intestinal fortitude (and I think he does) we will soon get a new investigation that exposes the partisan origins of the Russia hoax and asks many current and former federal officials, up to and including President Obama, “What did you know, and when did you know it.”
The Justice Department’s inspector general has been scrutinizing the FBI’s use of information from the Steele dossier to conduct surveillance on President Donald Trump and his associates from his 2016 presidential campaign and will release his report as soon as next month, Politico reports.
IG Michael Horowitz has been examining the FBI for close to a year and is investigating whether the agency possibly abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in October 2016 when it pulled a FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page based in part on information from Christopher Steele, a British ex-spy who claimed he was told by sources that Page and other Trump associates were working with Russians to help Trump win the election and boost Trump’s businesses.
The IG is reportedly focused on gauging Steele’s credibility as a source for the FBI, and the report “is going to try and deeply undermine Steele,” according to a source who spoke with Politico.
FISA allows U.S. agencies to secretly intercept a target’s communications with court approval.
Horowitz is also looking into whether FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who exchanged anti-Trump text messages while working on the Russia investigation, were guided by politics in their official actions.
Trump has long slammed the dossier as “phony” and a “con job.”
The dossier was published by BuzzFeed in January 2017, after the election.
Steele was being paid for his research by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm that was funded in part by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
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Bill Priestap, left, with Michael Horowitz, DoJ inspector general.
By Eric Felten, RealClearInvestigations
April 12, 2019
Attorney General William Barr shocked official Washington Wednesday by saying what previously couldn’t be said: That the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016 involved “spying.”
The recent release of transcripts of testimony by key players in the Trump-Russia probe suggests that the spying, which Barr vowed to investigate, is not the only significant possible violation of investigative rules and ethics committed by agents, lawyers, managers, and officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice.
A catalogue of those abuses can be found in testimony Edward William Priestap provided to Congress in a closed-door interview last summer. From the end of 2015 to the end of 2018 Bill Priestap was assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, which meant he oversaw the FBI’s global counterintelligence efforts.
In that role, he managed both of the bureau’s most politically sensitive investigations: the inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information and the probe into whether Donald Trump or his campaign conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election. His testimony provides rare insight into the attitudes and thoughts of officials who launched the Russia probe and the probe of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the release of whose final report is imminent.
More important, his testimony contains extensive indications of wrongdoing, including that the FBI and DoJ targeted Trump and did so with information it made no effort to verify. It paints a portrait of the Obama-era bureau as one that was unconcerned with political interference in investigations and was willing to enlist the help of close foreign allies to bring down its target. And, perhaps presaging a defense to Barr’s claim that American officials had spied on the Trump campaign, it showcases the euphemisms that can be used to disguise “spying.”
Filling In the Blanks
Priestap’s testimony took place on June 5, 2018, in Room 2226 of the Rayburn House Office Building. The questioning, by congressmen and House committee staff, focused on whether the FBI had applied the same rigor to the Clinton investigation that it had to the Trump probe.
The transcript the public can read today contains not only those questions and Priestap’s responses, but also the tell-tale redactions of anxious bureaucrats. One thing that is very clear is that the Sharpie brigades at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice really, really didn’t want anyone to know where Bill Priestap was a week into May 2016.
Rep. Jim Jordan: Where in the world was Bill Priestap?
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
Not long into the questioning that Tuesday morning last summer, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked, “Do you ever travel oversees?”
“Yes,” said Priestap.
“How often?”
“As little as possible.”
The seeming comedy routine notwithstanding, Jordan later asked how many times in his 2½ years running the counter-intelligence shop Priestap had traveled abroad.
“I want to say three times,” he said.
“And can you tell me where you went?” Jordan asked.
“The ones I’m remembering are the [REDACTED].”
Jordan drilled in: “All three times to [REDACTED]?
Priestap said the trips he remembered “off the top of my head were all [REDACTED].”
Jordan asked whether Priestap remembered when he went to this place. Priestap said “No.”
Jordan was back at it in later rounds of questioning, asking whether Priestap had traveled to a given location at a given time in 2016. Over and again, censors from the FBI and DoJ have redacted the location and the time.
What could this exotic destination be? How is the timing of Priestap’s trip there a matter of national security? What secrets were the redactors trying to protect?
Peter Strzok: “Bill” was in London.
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
It turns out the Sharpie people weren’t nearly as thorough as they presumably thought. Newly released transcripts of congressional testimony from FBI agent Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page – the paramours who worked on both the Clinton and Trump investigations – provide one answer. It’s right there on the page detailing text messages between the two on May 4, 2016. At around 9:31 that Wednesday evening, Strzok writes to say he is worried about getting a memo into shape that is expected that night or the next morning. He feels pressured even though “I don’t know that Bill will read it before he gets back from London next week.” Go to a text from the next Monday morning, May 9, and Strzok is wondering who will be receiving the daily report on the Clinton investigation, what “with Bill out.”
So there we have it. Bill Priestap was in London on or around May 9. Which strongly suggests that all three of the international trips taken by him during his tenure as FBI counterintelligence chief were to London.
Still, there is a reason the censors had out their Sharpies. It has to do with another question Jordan asked Priestap: “Okay. So what were you doing in [REDACTED] in the [REDACTED] of 2016?”
“So,” Priestap replied, “I went to meet with a foreign partner, foreign government partner.” In other words, almost certainly British intelligence. Not exposing our British partners has been the Justice Department’s justification for locking up secrets about the beginnings of the Trump investigation. The redactions try and fail to hide that Priestap met repeatedly with his British counterparts in 2016.
Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos was also in London. So was the FBI, around the same time.
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File
Students of the Russia-collusion saga will recall that some of the earliest and most significant events cited as leading to the FBI’s investigation of Team Trump took place in a certain REDACTED country during a REDACTED season in 2016. It was over breakfast on April 26 in London that the mysterious Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud, told young Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Five days later, on May 1, Papadopoulos had drinks with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in a London bar where he shared this piece of gossip/intel. And, of course, London is home to the author of the anti-Trump “dossier,” Christopher Steele.
According to the official story laid out in the New York Times, Australian officials did not pass on this new information for two months. And while Steele was retained by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS in the spring to dig up dirt on Trump for the Clinton campaign, the official story is that he did not start working with U.S. officials until the summer.
And so it is more than passingly curious that Priestap kept going to London when these significant events were occurring. Jordan asked Priestap about his second trip there: “What did it have to do with?”
Priestap demurred: “I’m not at liberty to discuss that today.”
After some dodging and weaving, Jordan came back to the question, but this time with an uncomfortable specificity: “Was your second trip then concerning the Trump-Russia investigation?” he asked.
“Sir, again, I’m just not at liberty to go into the purpose of my second trip.”
Priestap could have answered “no” without perjuring himself, he could have quickly put this matter to bed. His “I’m not at liberty” answers strongly suggest that the Trump-Russia investigation was exactly what his second trip to London was about.
Spying, Redefined
Attorney General Barr’s statement that “spying did occur” on the Trump campaign makes another part of Priestap’s testimony – about why an FBI asset in London named Stefan Halper reached out to Papadopoulos and to another Trump foreign policy adviser, Carter Page — even more significant.
Stefan Halper: also in London.
Voanews.com/Wikimedia
Weeks before Priestap’s testimony was taken last summer, the efforts of Halper, an American scholar who works in Britain, had been exposed. Republicans had been spluttering with outrage that the FBI would deploy a spy against an American presidential campaign. Democrats had been countering that while the bureau used informants, only the ignorant and uninitiated would call them spies.
Democratic staff counsel Valerie Shen tried to use her questioning of Priestap to put the spying issue to bed. “Does the FBI use spies?” she asked the assistant director for counterintelligence (who would be in a position to know).
“What do you mean?” Priestap responded. “I guess, what is your definition of a spy?”
“Good question,” said Shen. “What is your definition of a spy?”
Before Priestap answered, his lawyer, Mitch Ettinger, intervened. “Just one second,” he said. Then Ettinger – who was one of President Bill Clinton’s attorneys during the Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky scandal – conferred with his client.
Back on the record, Priestap presented what smacks of pre-approved testimony: “I’ve not heard of nor have I referred to FBI personnel or the people we engage with as – meaning who are working in assistance to us – as spies. We do evidence and intelligence collection in furtherance of our investigations.”
Shen was happy with the answer, and so she asked Priestap to confirm it: “So in your experience the FBI doesn’t use the term ‘spy’ in any of its investigative techniques?” Priestap assured her the word is never spoken by law-enforcement professionals – except, he said (wandering dangerously off-script), when referring to “foreign spies.”
“But in terms of one of its own techniques,” Shen said, determined to get Priestap back on track, “the FBI does not refer to one of its own techniques as spying?”
“That is correct, yes.”
“With that definition in mind, would the FBI internally ever describe themselves as spying on American citizens?”
“No.”
So there we have it with all the decisive logic of a Socratic dialogue: The FBI could not possibly have spied on the Trump campaign because bureau lingo includes neither the noun “spy” nor the verb “to spy.” Whatever informants may have been employed, whatever tools of surveillance may have been utilized, the FBI did not spy on the Trump campaign – didn’t spy by definition, as the bureau doesn’t use the term (except, of course, to describe the very same activities when undertaken by foreigners).
What’s telling about this line of questioning is that it inadvertently confirms Republican suspicions — and Attorney General Barr’s assertion. If House Democrats believed there had been no spying on the Trump campaign, they could have asked Priestap whether the FBI ever spies on Americans, given the common meaning of the verb “to spy.” They could have flat-out asked whether the FBI had spied on Trump World. Instead, Democratic counsel asked whether, given the FBI’s definition of spying, the bureau would “internally ever describe themselves as spying on American citizens.” It would seem that Democrats were every bit as convinced as Republicans that the FBI spied on Trump’s people.
Interpreting ‘Political Interference’
Later in the day, Democratic lawyer Shen seemed to be engaged in more damage control when she asked Priestap whether “political interference in the Department of Justice or FBI investigation [is] ever proper?”
Surprisingly, Priestap said it was: “In my opinion, I can imagine situations where it would be proper.” He explained that the political appointees in an administration might determine “that the national security interests of the country outweigh the law enforcement/prosecutive interest of the FBI and Department of Justice.”
Shen then appeared to push him to clean up his answer, suggesting that what Priestap was describing wasn’t “a political determination” but “a policy interpretation balancing national security and law enforcement.”
“Yeah. I guess,” Priestap said. “And maybe I misunderstood your question.” Then what does he do but repeat his belief that political appointees — and “by political, I could imagine, for example, the National Security Council” — might act on the notion that national security outweighs other considerations.”
“Right. Yeah. Right,” Shen said. “Let me rephrase.” She explained she wasn’t asking about decisions political officials make, but rather, decisions officials make for political reasons. Then came the rephrased question: “Is interference in a Department of Justice or FBI investigation ever proper when motivated by purely political considerations?” [Emphasis added]
“Not in my opinion,” responded Priestap.
What Shen was laboring to establish was that the only sort of investigative behavior that could be called political interference was when someone at DoJ or FBI acted out of “purely political considerations.” That’s a standard that leaves plenty of room for politics.
Targeting Trump?
But does it leave room enough for the “dossier”? The political abuse foremost in Republican minds was, and remains, that collection of howlers and hearsay allegedly compiled by Christopher Steele, who was sold to the public as a high-minded former British spy instead of a man being paid by the Clinton campaign to dirty up Trump. Steele’s efforts were lapped up by the FBI and DoJ even though the lawmen knew Steele was peddling political work-product — opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Carter Page: Was he the real quarry, or was Donald Trump?
Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP
In particular, Republicans have charged that Steele’s dossier was presented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court without full disclosure of its partisan origins, thus perpetrating a fraud on the FISA court. The accusation was formalized in May 2018, when Republicans demanded the appointment of a second special counsel because, they claimed, “the FBI and DOJ used politically biased, unverified sources to obtain warrants issued by the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISA Court) that aided in the surveillance of U.S. citizens, including Carter Page.”
Shen, the House Oversight Committee minority counsel, brushed that accusation aside with what appeared to be an unambiguous and definitive question: “Mr. Priestap,” she asked, “are you aware of any instances of the FBI and DOJ ever using politically biased, unverified sources in order to obtain a FISA warrant?”
Priestap gave the most unambiguous and definitive of answers: “No.” One might be tempted to think that was an endorsement of the dossier, a confirmation that the FISA warrant applications were largely based on information that was neither politically biased nor unverified. But that would be taking the question and the answer on face value, when something rather less straightforward was going on.
Shen followed with another broad, all-encompassing question about the propriety of the FBI and DoJ’s behavior: “Are you aware,” she asked Priestap, “of any instances where the FBI or DOJ did not present what constituted credible and sufficient evidence to justify a FISA warrant?”
Priestap’s response is a textbook case of circular logic: “If it’s not justified, the court doesn’t approve it. So, like, if we’re not meeting the standard required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the requests are turned down.”
“So, in other words,” said the Democratic counsel, “by definition, if you presented information and a FISA court approved it, that would constitute credible sufficient information?”
“In my opinion,” said Priestap, “yes.”
Sit back and savor that exchange for a moment. One of the most senior officials in the Federal Bureau of Investigation – an organization that regularly refers for prosecution people who don’t tell the full truth – champions this peculiar standard of credibility: If you can snooker a FISA court judge, the information used to traduce the court is rendered by definition “credible sufficient information.” What is the condition of the FBI if its leaders think whatever you can get past a judge is good enough?
This strange concept of legal alchemy aside, the question remains whether the dossier was used merely as a vehicle to get information on Carter Page, or whether the real quarry was Donald Trump himself. As before, Shen was unintentionally helpful at winkling inadvertent truths out of her cooperative witness. It started with the softest of softballs: “Are you aware of any FBI investigations motivated by political bias?”
“I am not.”
“Are you aware of any Justice Department investigations motivated by political bias?”
“No.”
“Are you aware of any actions ever taken to damage the Trump campaign at the highest levels of the Department of Justice or the FBI?”
“No.”
And there Shen might have left it, having elicited basic denials that the FBI and Justice had abused their power. But then she pushed her luck, asking a question that wasn’t worded quite carefully enough: “Are you aware of any actions ever taken to personally target Donald Trump at the highest levels of the Department of Justice or the FBI?”
Priestap must have pulled quite the face because Shen immediately declared, “I’ll rephrase.” Here’s how she tried it the second time: “Are you aware of any actions ever taken against Donald Trump at the highest levels of the Department of Justice or the FBI?”
Before Priestap can answer, his lawyer, Mitch Ettinger, interjected: “I think you need to rephrase your question.”
At which point Shen’s Democratic colleague Janet Kim jumped in to help: “Are you aware of any actions ever taken against Donald Trump at the highest levels of the Department of Justice or the FBI for the purpose of politically undercutting him?”
At last, Priestap was able to say, “No.”
That long road to “no” strong suggests that the highest levels of Justice and the FBI personally targeted Trump and took action against him. The only caveat is that Priestap believes none of that targeted action was done to undercut Trump politically. That may be so (however much the savvy observer may think otherwise). But it doesn’t blunt the main takeaway — that the bureau and DoJ targeted Trump.
In Summary…
So what did we learn from Bill Priestap’s compendious and revealing testimony?
- We learned that the FBI and Justice targeted and took action against Trump.
- We learned that the FBI, according to Priestap, is incapable of securing a FISA warrant with information that isn’t credible, although the judge’s approval of the warrant means by definition that the information is credible.
- We learned that the FBI believes political interference in an investigation can be proper as long as the bureau isn’t acting purely politically.
- We learned that the FBI did send at least one asset to do to the Trump campaign an activity that even the bureau would call “spying” — if it were done by foreign operatives.
- We learned that the origins of the Trump-Russia tale will never be fully understood until the part played by British intelligence is made clear.
That’s an awful lot to take away from one largely neglected transcript. But it suggests just how much remains unknown about the Trump-Russia investigation while providing a glimpse at the people that want to keep it that way.
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“Our government,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”
Would that Brandeis could rise from the dead to oversee the investigation and likely prosecution of those whose determination to oppose Donald J. Trump was so fierce that they conspired to create a narrative of treason that has now been revealed to be a charade.
Let the reckoning begin.
I’m not talking about settling scores with the dozens of mainstream media figures who spent the last two years “informing” their viewers/listeners/readers that President Trump and his campaign had broken the law to conspire with the Russian government to fix the 2016 election. They were wrong, and they now have been proven wrong, by the very man in whom they placed their deep and abiding faith.
If, as we were reminded repeatedly during the last presidential administration, the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, those charlatans will lose their audiences, their sponsors, and, eventually, their livelihoods.
I’m talking instead about the reckoning for the current and former government officials – holders of a public trust – who deliberately abused that trust to lead their fellow citizens on what they knew from the beginning was a wild goose chase. They knew it was a wild goose chase because they were the ones who created it in the first place.
I’m talking specifically about former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, among others.
These are the people who, together, spun a fable about corruption and treason and international intrigue that led to horrific damage – damage to individuals caught in the cross-hairs of the “investigation” they launched, damage to their government, damage to their country.
Example: As I sat to write this, it occurred to me that President Trump’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday was the first meeting Trump had had with a foreign leader who didn’t have just cause to wonder if and when Trump would be leaving office early as a result of the investigation.
That is, for more than two years now – in fact, for the entire duration of his presidency – President Trump has been handicapped in his conduct of foreign policy by the inevitable doubts among foreign leaders who couldn’t help but wonder about the value (and duration) of a deal struck with Trump, or a threat made by Trump.
That handicapping of our president doesn’t just hurt him, it hurts our entire nation.
It must not be allowed to happen again. To that end, a reckoning must ensue – not for reasons of revenge, but because punishing criminals for their criminal behavior is the best way to head off future criminal behavior, both by them and by others encouraged to behave criminally after seeing earlier criminal behavior go unpunished.
Congressional Democrats now insist that the entire Mueller report be handed over to them and made public, even though they know there are parts of it that must be redacted. Fine. I agree. Scrub the document and remove the national security information and any information that would violate grand jury secrecy, and let us see the rest of it.
But while we’re releasing the Mueller report, let’s also release the FISA warrant applications. Let’s release the testimony from the secret hearings. Let’s release the memoranda memorializing the opening of the investigation, and the “scope” memorandum Rosenstein issued in August 2017, months after he appointed Mueller (when he failed to cite a crime to be investigated by Mueller, as Justice Department guidelines require).
Let’s appoint a new special counsel to investigate those former FBI and Justice Department officials – along with Brennan and Clapper – who created this entire narrative. Have them interrogated by FBI officials. Let them hand over their new-found post-government cable TV pundit earnings to white-collar defense attorneys to help them maintain their innocence.
Wrote one of them recently, “The rule of law depends upon fair administration of justice, which is rooted in complete and unbiased investigation. We are best served when an investigation finds all relevant facts and illuminates the fullest possible view of the truth.”
I agree. I would add that we are best served when those upon whom we rely for the administration of justice actually do their jobs without fear or favor, and follow the law as written without regard to the last name of the subject of their investigation.
Just FYI, that quote was from Comey, writing last week in The New York Times. Like the blind squirrel, even he can find an acorn every now and then.
President Trump, in an exclusive wide-ranging interview Wednesday night with Fox News’ “Hannity,” vowed to release the full and unredacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants and related documents used by the FBI to probe his campaign, saying he wants to “get to the bottom” of how the long-running Russia collusion narrative began.
Trump told anchor Sean Hannity that his lawyers previously had advised him not to take that dramatic step out of fear that it could be considered obstruction of justice.
“I do, I have plans to declassify and release. I have plans to absolutely release,” Trump said. “I have some very talented people working for me, lawyers, they really didn’t want me to do it early on.”
Trump also accused FBI officials of committing “treason” — slamming former FBI Director James Comey as a “terrible guy,” former CIA Director John Brennan as potentially mentally ill, and Democrat House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff as a criminal.
Redacted versions of FISA documents already released have revealed that the FBI extensively relied on documents produced by Christopher Steele, an anti-Trump British ex-spy working for a firm funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, to surveil Trump aide Carter Page. At least one senior DOJ official had apparent concerns Steele was unreliable, according to text messages exclusively obtained last week by Fox News.
The leaked dossier, and related FBI surveillance, kickstarted a media frenzy on alleged Russia-Trump collusion that ended with a whimper on Sunday, when it was revealed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe concluded finding no evidence of such a conspiracy, despite several offers by Russians to help the Trump campaign. Page was never charged with wrongdoing.
Citing a high-level source, Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul late Wednesday tweeted that anti-Trump ex-CIA Director John Brennan had internally pushed the dossier. Fox News has not independently verified Paul’s source.
“I think Brennan’s a sick person, really I do,” Trump said, sharply criticizing Brennan’s “horrible” claims in recent weeks that Trump had committed treason himself. “I think there’s something wrong with him.”
Brennan was one of the loudest and most virulent voices to trumpet the Russian collusion theory over the past two years, asserting falsely just weeks ago that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was likely planning to indict members of the Trump administration’s family in a scene reminiscent of the “ides of March” and the assassination of Julius Caesar. He since implied he had “bad information.”
“When I said there could be somebody spying on my campaign, it went wild out there,” Trump told Hannity. “They couldn’t believe I could say such a thing. As it turned out, that was small potatoes compared to what went on. … Millions and millions [spent] on the phony dossier, and then they used the dossier to start things. It was a fraud, paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.”
Just hours earlier Wednesday, Trump made clear he was enthusiastic about the idea of appointing a second special counsel to review the origins of the Russia investigation when it came up during a meeting Tuesday with Republican senators, a source familiar with the discussions told Fox News.
In an apparent shot at former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump also told Hannity “this all would not have happened” if Attorney General William Barr had been with his administration from the beginning.
“If you wrote this as a novel, nobody would buy it; it would be a failure, because it would be too unbelievable,” Trump said. “We’re getting to the bottom of it. This can never, ever happen to a president again. That was a disgrace and an embarrassment to our country. … Hopefully they won’t get away with it.”
“We’ll have to see how it all started, but I’m going to leave that to other people, including the attorney general and others, to make that determination,” Trump continued. “Fifty years, 100 years from now — if someone tries the same thing, they have to know the penalty will be very very great if and when they get caught.”
Trump also lashed out at Schiff, D-Calif., who has pushed strongly for investigations into possible Trump-Russia links. “Schiff is a bad guy, he knew he was lying — he’s not a dummy. For a year and a half he would just leak and call up CNN and others. You know, I watch him, so sanctimonious … He knew it was a lie, and he’d get in the back room with his friends in the Democrat Party, and they would laugh like hell. In one way, you could say it’s a crime what he did — he was making statements he knew were false. He’s a disgrace to our country.”
The president insisted the U.S. should have a “great relationship” with Russia and China, but that the “fake news” and “nonsense” distorted his intentions into something more sinister.
(Win McNamee / Getty)
Trump also criticized Comey, whom he’d fired in 2017, as a “terrible guy.” He insisted he did not fire him to obstruct justice, telling Hannity he knew that firing Comey would only increase scrutiny on the White House.
“It was treason, it was really treason,” Trump said, referring to texts between former FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page that discussed an “insurance policy” in the event of Trump’s election.
“You had dirty cops, you had people who are bad FBI folks … At the top, they were not clean, to put it mildly.” He said later, “We can never allow these treasonous acts to happen to another president.”
Separately, Trump also said he hopes Democrats continue pushing the Green New Deal, which flamed out in a test vote on Tuesday, as most Democrats voted “present” instead of going on record supporting the sweeping transformation of the entire U.S. economy.
Trump’s interview came as multiple GOP lawmakers have claimed the president trampled all over what may have been the best week of his presidency by backing the complete overturn of ObamaCare.
On Monday, the Justice Department asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans to affirm last year’s ruling by a Texas federal judge stating that the Affordable Care Act was no longer constitutional because the 2017 tax reform legislation eliminated the health care law’s penalty for not having health insurance.
Multiple congressional Republicans told Fox News they were bothered by the timing of the Trump administration’s intervention in the matter, which came on the heels of the Mueller report findings, the House sustaining the president’s veto of a bill to halt the national emergency for the border wall and a Senate vote that shined a spotlight on what conservatives described as problems with the Green New Deal, championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
Fox News’ Sean Hannity and Catherine Herridge contributed to this report.
A flashback look at the Deep State and establishment media hype over the now “debunked” Trump, Russia collusion narrative.
Source: InfoWars
A former Trump campaign aide central to the early days of the FBI's Russia investigation said the FBI wanted him to wear a wire to record conversations with a professor who had told him the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
George Papadopoulos, the first of five Trump aides to plead guilty and agree to cooperate in special counsel Robert Mueller's recently-concluded investigation, told House lawmakers and staff in a closed-door interview last October that he rejected the FBI request.
A transcript of that interview was released Tuesday by the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee as part of an ongoing effort to sow doubt about the origins of the FBI's investigation into possible coordination between Russia and President Donald Trump's campaign. Mueller ended his investigation last week without finding a criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign to affect the 2016 presidential election, according to a Justice Department summary of his findings released Sunday.
Papadopoulos was a vital figure in the early days of the FBI's investigation. The revelation that Papadopoulos had learned in an April 2016 meeting in London that Russia had "dirt" on Democrat Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of stolen emails helped kick start the FBI probe months later.
In his interview with lawmakers, Papadopoulos says an FBI agent asked him during a 2017 encounter to wear a wire to a record future conversations with the Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud, who he has said told him about the "dirt."
"And he basically told me that Washington wants answers and you're at the center of this, something like that to make it seem like I was in some deep trouble if I wasn't going to wear a wire against this person," Papadopoulos said, describing his conversation with the agent. "I rejected it."
The FBI did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
Papadopoulos said he wasn't sure what to make of Mifsud's claim about Russia having dirt on Clinton since, at the time, "people were openly speculating about that."
"So yeah, it was an interesting piece of information, but you know, by that point you have to understand, he had failed to introduce me to anyone of substance in the Russian Government," Papadopoulos said. "So he failed to do that, but now all of a sudden he has the keys to the kingdom about a massive potential conspiracy that Russia is involved in.
Papadopoulos pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Mifsud and was sentenced to 14 days in prison. Papadopoulos has been promoting a new book called "Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump."
The Papadopoulos transcript is the latest release over the last month from Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. Other transcripts recently made public include those of Justice Department lawyer Bruce Ohr and ex-FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, all steady targets of Trump's outrage.
Source: NewsMax Politics
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Footwear aplenty will fall as more details from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report are disclosed. The reckoning will come in several baskets and will fall on Democrats and Republicans alike, with major ramifications for 2020.
Basket No. 1: More information about the Mueller Report and the basis for its conclusions.
The public wants that information and deserves it. Democrats will cry “coverup” if they don’t get everything. While Republicans emphasize “no collusion,” Democrats will concentrate their attention on Mueller’s indecision regarding President Trump’s possible obstruction of justice. Democrats will press Attorney General William Barr about the special counsel’s ambiguous conclusion—and Barr’s own definitive one–about the obstruction issue. Other Trump critics, who heretofore have described Bob Mueller as a modern-day Eliot Ness, will start crying, “Whitewash!”
There are four potential obstacles to releasing the entire report and underlying evidence. Some of it may be classified, some protected by grand jury secrecy, and some may reflect badly on people Mueller declined to charge. The president could also claim executive privilege, but probably won’t because doing so is perilous politically.
Perilous, too, is the Democrats’ insistent demand for transparency. The investigation was thorough – and lasted more than the first half of Trump’s four-year term. More evidence might only reinforce Trump’s claim he’s entirely innocent. He’ll pound that home.
Basket No. 2: Will House Democrats push ahead with other investigations of Trump?
The short answer is: Yes. The big decision is how long they will keep it up. The liberal donor base loves it, but most voters do not. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knows that and wants to protect her majority, which depends on swing districts. But she can’t control the party’s vocal left wing or its independent committee chairs, particularly Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff.
Basket No. 3: Expect serious backlash as voters ask, “Who led us down this rabbit hole?”
Average voters—not on the extremes in either party—are bound to ask that question. The Democrats and their media allies have made “Russia Collusion” their top story line for two years. If they persist on that course instead of focusing on health care, income inequality, and foreign enemies, they look like Inspector Javert, or, worse, Inspector Clouseau.
The mainstream media are already badly damaged. They followed the same path and, in the process, obliterated the once-sacred line between reporting and opinion.
Basket No. 4: Did the FBI, Department of Justice, and intelligence agencies commit their own wrongdoing?
This final basket overflows with shoes that could drop. The cascade may well begin with three upcoming reports from DoJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz likely to result in grand jury investigations. So will the documents that Trump could declassify and release. (He’s been waiting for the Mueller investigation to end.) To restore faith in the rule of law, prosecutions cannot be seen as political retaliation. Accountability for law enforcement and intelligence agencies should be pursued by apolitical career prosecutors and made as transparent as possible.
The slap-dash investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email shenanigans must be thoroughly reviewed. Her aides received unprecedented immunity without giving evidence; their computers and cellphones were destroyed; and the principal herself was cleared before an interview with her was conducted. Who really made the decision not to prosecute? James Comey says he did. But FBI lawyer Lisa Page testified under oath that the order came from the Department of Justice. This discrepancy must be resolved, along with the obvious questions raised by the original decision. How high up did it go? Did it reach the Obama White House?
Who unmasked the countless U.S. citizens whose names came up during foreign surveillance operations? Who illegally leaked them? Expect to learn about FBI and intelligence agencies’ efforts to penetrate the Trump campaign. Who was behind it? On what evidence did they base it?
We also need to know a lot more about the warrant to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. He is a U.S. citizen, entitled to those protections, and had cooperated freely with our intelligence community. But the FBI decided on secret surveillance. It came up empty.
Was the surveillance warrant against Page obtained on false pretenses? This would be the case if the foreign intelligence court (FISA) was given inaccurate, incomplete, and unverified information. That is almost certainly what happened, and the evidence needs to be fleshed out. How important was the “Russian dossier” compiled by Christopher Steele at the direction of Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS? Why wasn’t its funding by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee disclosed to the courts? Why didn’t the warrant-seekers disclose Steele’s bias, which was known to the FBI? Why did top law-enforcement officials certify the dossier as verified when it was not? To compound this mess, why wasn’t the court given exculpatory evidence, as required?
While the court was being told one thing, Donald Trump was being told another. Comey specifically told Trump the dossier was not verified. That’s not in dispute. Nor is the leak that immediately followed the briefing. Until then, media outlets had declined to mention the dossier because it looked so unreliable. A presidential briefing made it newsworthy. The story was bound to damage Trump, which was apparently the reason for the briefing. This matters not only because the leak was illegal but because it appears to have been part of a coordinated effort by law-enforcement agencies to undermine a presidential candidate and duly-elected president. We need to know what happened—all of it—and then hold people accountable. If laws need to be changed to prevent its repetition, pass them.
After all this time, the FBI still refuses to say what started the Trump investigations. It won’t say if agents tried to entrap people associated with the campaign. It won’t say why it did not warn Trump that Russians might be trying to penetrate his campaign. Contrast that with the kid-glove treatment of Dianne Feinstein, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, when her driver was found to be a Chinese spy. She was privately informed and the staffer quietly removed.
Those are major, unanswered questions. They are central to the rule of law, and there are far too many of them. The answers are likely to pose serious problems for top officials in President Obama’s DoJ, FBI, and intelligence agencies.
A boatload of shoes is about to drop.
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