Andy McCarthy: The FBI Relied on the Unverified Steele Dossier
It turns out, however, that the crazies were right and I was wrong. The FBI (and, I’m even more sad to say, my Justice Department) brought the FISA court the Steele-dossier allegations, relying on Steele’s credibility without verifying his information.
I am embarrassed by this not just because I assured people it could not have happened, and not just because it is so beneath the bureau — especially in a politically fraught case in which the brass green-lighted the investigation of a presidential campaign. I am embarrassed because what happened here flouts rudimentary investigative standards. Any trained FBI agent would know that even the best FBI agent in the country could not get a warrant based on his own stellar reputation. A fortiori, you would never seek a warrant based solely on the reputation of Christopher Steele — a non-American former intelligence agent who had political and financial incentives to undermine Donald Trump.
Update: House Intel asks Trump to declassify rest of FISA application; tantalizing clues about pages 10-12 and 17-34
Russia! Russia! er…Russia?
Related: Peter Strzok’s arrogance is the product of a corrupt FBI
(4) This is ringing alarm bells.
Strzok's father. pic.twitter.com/o7ZFR76MXN
— Thomas Wictor (@ThomasWictor) 14 July 2018
Fusion GPS was/is essentially in the ‘information for hire‘ business, selling to clients for a price and using networks of journalists and former government officials to transmit, share and disseminate information on behalf of their clients. Essentially, Fusion GPS is an opposition research group with a network of journalists, paid and unpaid, that it uses to frame constructed narratives to the benefit of their clients. In the spring, summer and fall of 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign was one such client.
In April 2017, at the time of this meeting with AP reporters, Andrew Weissmann was chief of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud section. Weissmann joined the special counsel a month later, May 2017.
We already know the FISA searches were essentially political opposition research being conducted by these opaque ‘contractors’. We know the ideology within the DOJ-NSD and FBI, the generic intent of their motive, from the communication amid the group doing the Clinton and Trump investigations; text messages, memos and emails which have since become public.
Lawyers for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort are crying foul over a meeting Justice Department prosecutors held with four Associated Press reporters last year as news organizations and the FBI bore down on the longtime lobbyist and political consultant.
Manafort’s defense has argued for months that the off-the-record session on April 11, 2017, was a potential conduit for improper leaks to the press about the probe that led to two criminal cases against the former Trump campaign chief.
Now, Manafort’s attorneys have fresh evidence they say bolsters their claims: two memos written by FBI agents who attended the meeting and documented their version of what transpired.
Manafort’s legal team paints the evidence as confirmation that journalists were given inside information about the investigation in violation of Justice Department policies and, perhaps, legal prohibitions on disclosure of grand jury secrets.
Via Drudge, where there are additional items up.
The NSA is effectively noting that collected call logs are infected with errors. The NSA cannot isolate or fix these errors. As a result, the NSA is actively purging all the data they have ever collected.
By all data I mean every bit of data collected under the USA Freedom Act of 2015 (Fact sheet here). About 685 million call logs.
Which is pretty odd given that this matter was supposedly addressed back in early 2017.
[…]
This doesn’t feel like a corrective action. This feels like a purge.
The whole world knew of the Abedin-Weiner marriage. The bandits of the Afghanistan mountains knew Huma and Anthony were married. The chipmunks of Central Park knew Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin were married. There are anchorites sitting on a tree spike somewhere in a desolate and empty landscape that knew this. Charlie Rose knew it.
However, there was one man, one mind alone, not furnished with that factum. It was the top man at the FBI, the No. 1 sleuth of the greatest investigative institution in all of human history, James Comey.
Nobody cuts through the bullshit like the Great One.
More here:
1) Don’t believe anyone who claims Horowitz didn’t find bias. He very carefully says that he found no “documentary” evidence that bias produced “specific investigatory decisions.” That’s different #IGReport
— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) June 14, 2018
BUMPED FOR UPDATE: The report is public, can be accessed here.
New developments.. An FBI attorney who worked on the special counsel’s Russia investigation until earlier this year sent anti-Trump text messages to a colleague, including one exclaiming: “Viva le Resistance.”
Fox News: The Justice Department inspector general referred five FBI employees for investigation into whether their politically-charged and “hostile” text messages and instant messages violated FBI code, according to the damning inspector general report released Thursday.
Original post continues below… scroll down for further finds from the report.
IG Report findings begin to trickle out…
Former FBI Director James Comey “deviated” from FBI and Justice Department procedures in handling the probe into Hillary Clinton, damaging the law enforcement agencies’ image of impartiality even though he wasn’t motivated by political bias, the department’s watchdog found in a highly anticipated report.
“While we did not find that these decisions were the result of political bias on Comey’s part, we nevertheless concluded that by departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice,” Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in the report’s conclusions, which were obtained Thursday by Bloomberg News.
Horowitz’s report examined actions taken by top officials before the 2016 election, including the handling of the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. The investigation expanded to touch on an array of politically sensitive decisions by officials including Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Nothing that readers of this site won’t already know, but we’re not most people. I’ll expand on this post as updates (and the official release) come in.
I recommend you watch this Twitter account, as well. (sorry, corrected with link).
Related: The Silencing of the Inspectors General.
FBI agent Peter Strzok assured his mistress and colleague Lisa Page that they would stop Donald Trump from winning the presidency in a text message, a new report from the DOJ inspector general finds per Bloomberg News White House Correspondent Jennifer Jacobs.
“Several FBI employees Who played critical roles in the investigation sent political messages,” the report reads, according to Jacobs.
“(Trump’s) not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page wrote to Strzok, Bloomberg reports.
“No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it,” Strzok reportedly replied
How is it that Lisa Page’s question (“Trump’s not going to become president, right?”) was leaked, but Peter Strzok’s response (“No, we’ll stop it”) was not until now? And how is that not a massive deal?
My mind is boggled.
— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) June 14, 2018
More.
"No bias at the FBI" or something. This exchange is nuts. pic.twitter.com/uUj0NlYNAf
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) June 14, 2018
A former security director for the Senate Intelligence Committee — who was in charge of maintaining all classified information from the Executive Office to the panel — was indicted for allegedly giving false statements to FBI agents looking into possible leaks to reporters, the Justice Department announced Thursday night.
James A. Wolfe, 58, served as the panel’s security director for 29 years, according to the feds.
Wolfe lied to the FBI in December 2017 about contacts he had with three reporters, the indictment read. He also allegedly lied about giving two reporters non-public information about committee matters.
Earlier Thursday, the New York Times revealed that federal investigators had seized years’ worth of email and phone records relating to one of its reporters, Ali Watkins. She previously had a three-year romantic relationship with Wolfe,…
@TheLastRefuge2 – Choosing this particular intelligence leaker, Jim Wolfe, to indict first was also very smart strategy. Wolfe indictment captures 4 Reporters, 4 outlets: CNN, NYT, NBC and ABC. Thereby most major media journalists are immediately on notice.
POLITICIZING THE FBI: How James Comey Succeeded Where Richard Nixon Failed
Recent revelations show, chillingly, that he involved the FBI in what appears to have been a plot to entrap, and even frame, a political opponent and his campaign regarding Russian collusion. This radical politicization of the Bureau makes any Nixonian scheme seem like child’s play. Nixon shamefully tricked the FBI into doing a routine background check on his enemy, journalist Daniel Schorr. Comey outdid Nixon by a wide margin, using his FBI to construct a false case of possible treason against a political enemy.
Grab a coffee.
If FBI contractors were mining the FBI's NSA-connected database for political opposition research on behalf of their paying clients such as, oh, let's say, THE DNC & THE HILLARY CLINTON CAMPAIGN & they pulled the name 'Michael Cohen' visiting Prague out of that database…
— Stealth Jeff (@drawandstrike) May 29, 2018
Obama’s spying scandal is starting to look a lot like Watergate;
“F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims,” read the headline on a lengthy New York Times story May 18. “The Justice Department used a suspected informant to probe whether Trump campaign aides were making improper contacts with Russia in 2016,” read a story in the May 21 edition of the Wall Street Journal.
So much for those who dismissed charges of Obama administration infiltration of Donald Trump’s campaign as paranoid fantasy. Defenders of the Obama intelligence and law enforcement apparat have had to fall back on the argument that this infiltration was for Trump’s — and the nation’s — own good.
It’s an argument that evidently didn’t occur to Richard Nixon’s defenders when it became clear that Nixon operatives had burglarized and wiretapped the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in June 1972.
Related. ” Bad as these latest developments are, however, they pale in comparison to looming negative consequences now that the State Department has begun dribbling out more than 30,000 missing Clinton emails, together with supporting attachments.”
When The Obama Administration Became The Deep State
In early January 2017, then-President Barack Obama, SHMOTUS Joe Biden, and a small sub-group of the national security team began their transition to what’s commonly called the “Deep State.” Based on the footprints they left behind we can tell that they took time from their real jobs of running the country, this proto-deep state planned, coordinated, and leaked a timed media burst of articles about Trump and Russia. Each of the stories was leaked to different outlets. Each story was published between the 10th and 12th of January. This was the turning point when the Obama Administration became the deep state.
At NRO on Tuesday, Andrew McCarthy came to an important conclusion about the Trump-Russia investigation. It has been increasingly clear that the investigation – to the extent we may call it that – started quite a while before 31 July 2016, the date long given for its formal launch. McCarthy suggests it began in the early spring, probably around the end of March.
The Hunter Becomes the Hunted;
In response to Trump’s demand, Rod Rosenstein has asked the DOJ inspector general to review the possible infiltration of the Trump campaign. The hunters have themselves become the hunted. For better or worse, two major American political factions are trying to jail each other. The outcome of their struggle may determine not only who occupies the White House, but what future role the intelligence agencies play in public life.
The specifics of the individual accusations may be fake, but the struggle over the control of the bureaucracy is frighteningly real. Concern over the independence of powerful bureaucracies has long been paramount for a reason. The biggest problem with weaponizing intelligence agencies is it CREATES a pathway for the foreign takeover of the system. If a once hostile power takes over the White House and that president corrupts the agencies, an unfettered secret police will have the ability to remain in power indefinitely. […]
Trump, by officially demanding an answer into whether the previous administration engaged in political spying, is effectively accusing them of cheating at cards. As everybody knows, once you ask this question at a table, the surface game stops and a deeper game begins.
Related: In Politicized Justice, Desperate Times Call for Disparate Measures
Just grab a coffee, and read them both.
