Despite fevered GOP whining, from the start the FBI has always helped and protected Trump
Blocking investigations, and changing reports the DOJ and FBI have repeatedly helped Trump
Reposted from Dailykos August 16, 2022
If you listen to Trump, you’d believe that the FBI has been on a “witch hunt” after him for years.
"A horrible thing that took place yesterday at Mar-a-Lago," Trump argued. "We are no better than a third world country, a banana republic. It is a continuation of Russia, Russia, Russia, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax # 2, the no collusion Mueller Report, and more. To make matters worse it is all, in my opinion, a coordinated attack with Radical Left Democrat state & local D.A.’s & A.G.’s."
[...] "What took place yesterday, and long before, was an unprecedented infringement of the rights of every American citizen," Trump argued. "Scam after Scam, year after year, it is all the Radical Left Democrats really know, it is their lifeblood - they have no shame. Our Country is paying a very big price!!!"
But the truth which many of us know is that many people in the FBI repeatedly played favorites in Trump’s favor — not against him. There were damn good reasons for investigating Russia and the Trump campaign. Trump really did try to extort Zelensky in exchange for planting a smear against Joe Biden. No charges were filed for that. Trump really did incite thousands of people to attack the Capitol to prevent Biden from taking over the Presidency. No charges [of Insurrection} are pending for all we know. And most importantly, the Mueller Report didn’t say anything about “No Collusion” because collusion is not a crime, however it did say that Trump was “Not Exonerated” on 8 potential cases of obstruction of justice and that many in his campaign had direct communications with Russians which they repeatedly lied about under oath. And yet, charges of obstruction have never been filed against Trump since he left office meanwhile the statute of limitations is rapidly running out. They frankly should have already arrested him for illegally having custody of 72 boxes of stolen government documents stuffed in his basement, but they haven’t yet. I really have to wonder are they really “out to get him?” It doesn’t seem like it.
When people say the "FBI is biased against Trump" I seriously have to laugh out loud.
L (Freaking) OL! I mean, c’mon — get serious.
It was the FBI who revealed that they were investigating Anthony Weiner's emails just 11 days -- 11 FRACKING DAYS -- before the 2016 election which directly violated their own rules on not interfering with elections. Supposedly this was the reason that James Comey was fired based on the memo written by Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, not for being biased against Trump but for supposedly being biased against Hillary Clinton.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has long been regarded as our nation's premier federal investigative agency. Over the past year, however, the FBI's reputation and credibility have suffered substantial damage, and it has affected the entire Department of Justice. That is deeply troubling to many Department employees and veterans, legislators and citizens.
The current FBI Director is an articulate and persuasive speaker about leadership and the immutable principles of the Department of Justice. He deserves our appreciation for his public service. As you and I have discussed, however, I cannot defend the Director's handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton's emails, and I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken. Almost everyone agrees that the Director made serious mistakes; it is one of the few issues that unites people of diverse perspectives.
That action BY ITSELF, probably gave Trump the election. That alone put him in the White House, but sure — the FBI is “against him.” Yeah Right.
When it comes to having “links” to Russia we could start with Trump making $98 Million selling condos to Russian Oligarchs in South Florida, and $Millions more renting to them in Trump Tower, including a Russian gambling and money laundering ring on the 63rd floor, or then there’s the Russian mobsters in his Casinos while they got repeatedly fined for money laundering. Charges? Shmarges. Pffft.
But none of that really counts because it was all before he ran for President, right?
The real problem begins with members of Trump's campaign who were *absolutely* in contact with Russians - Papadopoulos was talking with Mifsud and Timofeev.
One of the Russians who was in touch with Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos throughout 2016 told CNN he was willing to open doors for the campaign, and broker meetings with Russian officials, only to see the “unprofessional” young aide disappear from his radar.
The comments from Russian foreign policy analyst Ivan Timofeev, shed new light on how Papadopoulos repeatedly tried but failed to arrange a Russia trip for himself or other aides working for President Donald Trump’s campaign.
“We did not close the door to the guy, but we did not take it seriously,” Timofeev told CNN earlier this year in his Moscow office. “He was very enthusiastic. He was very interested in Russia and improving relations, but he seemed to be so unprofessional and so unprepared for a serious conversation.”
Manafort was talking with Kilimnik (who was linked to the GRU, Russian Military Intelligence).
Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had deep ties to a Russian intelligence officer and secretly shared campaign information, according to a sweeping Senate Intelligence Committee report released Tuesday.
The nearly 1,000-page report offers a detailed portrait of Manafort’s connection to Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the Senate panel identifies as a Russian intelligence officer with potential ties to the hack of Democratic emails during the 2016 election.
“On numerous occasions over the course of his time on the Trump Campaign, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik,” the committee wrote.
A later Senate report indicates that Kilimnik may have shared that campaign information with the Russia spies who hacked the DNC.
The Senate Intelligence Committee said in a report released Tuesday that a key associate of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is a Russian intelligence officer who may have helped coordinate the Russian hacking and leaking of Democratic emails, and that Manafort himself may have had knowledge of the effort before the emails were leaked.
According to the bipartisan Senate report, Manafort associate and ex-employee Konstantin Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer who may have had links to the hack-and-leak operation of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, which hacked the emails of prominent Democrats and provided them to WikiLeaks.
The report includes three bulleted items that were redacted before release. The report says the redacted information "suggests that a channel for coordination on the GRU hack-and-leak operation may have existed through Kilimnik, [but] the Committee had limited insight into Kilimnik's communications with Manafort and [REDACTED], all of whom used sophisticated communications security practices."
But were told the Trump campaign had “nothing to do with Russia?” Baloney.
Roger Stone was talking with Wikileaks and GRU Asset Guccifer 2.0.
A former top Trump campaign official on Tuesday testified that President Donald Trump talked to political trickster Roger Stone about WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign.
That testimony by Rick Gates at Stone’s trial contrasts with Trump’s claim last November that he did not recall speaking to Stone about WikiLeaks, the document disclosure group that during the 2016 campaign released emails stolen from the Democratic Party and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s own campaign chief.
Gates testified in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., that less than a minute after finishing a July 2016 call from Stone, Trump indicated that “more information would be coming” from Wikileaks.
Later on when the Washington Post was about to publish the infamous “grab ‘em by the Pussy tape” — the Trump campaign through Steve Bannon contacted Roger Stone and had him tell Wikileaks to release the pending Podesta emails.
October 2016, during the fraught final weeks of the showdown between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Roger Stone got word that a damning recording of his candidate was about to drop. That tape would become instantly infamous for Trump’s degrading remarks about women and his apparent boasts about committing sexual assault. “When you’re a star, they let you do it—you can do anything,” Trump told Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush in 2005, in audio published by the Washington Post. “Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Apparently sensing the cataclysmic damage the comments would wreak, Stone—self-styled dirty trickster and unofficial Trump adviser—spoke by phone to the conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, directing him to get in touch with Julian Assange, whose organization, WikiLeaks, had obtained Russian-hacked emails from Democratic Party staffers, including Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. “Drop the Podesta emails immediately,” Stone instructed, seeking to “balance the news cycle” after the release of the Access Hollywood tape. Thirty-two minutes later, WikiLeaks followed through.
Afterward the campaign messaged Stone and told him “Good job.” That people, is called “Collusion.” Most of this information was redacted from the original Mueller report because Stone’s trial was still pending at the time, now it’s over and this is all public knowledge from his trial transcripts.
Don Jr talked to Russian Lawyer Veselnitskaya and her GRU tag-along and agreed to drop Magnitsky Act sanctions in exchange for dirt about illegal contributions to the DNC — until it turned out the dirt was nothing but fairie dust — but also Alexander Torshin and convicted Russia Spy Maria Butina.
Hours after Donald Trump shocked the world by siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin rather than his own intelligence agencies regarding Russia’s attempts to skew the 2016 election, the Justice Department announced that it had filed charges against yet another Russian. Maria Butina, a pro-gun activist and graduate student living in the D.C. area, was indicted for “infiltrating organizations having influence in American politics, for the purpose of advancing the interests of the Russian Federation.” Butina, 29, was arrested on Sunday in Washington, D.C.
If true, the indictment, which was unsealed Monday, paints a remarkable picture of Russian efforts to use the National Rifle Association to insinuate themselves into Republican politics and, ultimately, the 2016 presidential campaign. Butina and her former boss, Alexander Torshin—the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank and a former Russian senator who allegedly has ties to Russia’s criminal underground—became lifetime members of the N.R.A. and ran a Russian version of the group called the Right to Bear Arms. Over the years, both cultivated relationships with powerful members of the gun-rights group, particularly Republicans, who they allegedly believed would be friendlier to Russian interests. (Torshin is reportedly under investigation by the F.B.I. for channeling money to the N.R.A. to benefit the Trump campaign.) According to the indictment, Butina even had a “private meeting” with an unnamed “political candidate” in 2015, at the N.R.A.’s annual members’ meeting.
[...] There are additional points of contact, however. Torshin did meet with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., at a private dinner during an N.R.A. convention in Louisville, Kentucky, the following year. (Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Don Jr., said their conversation was restricted to “gun-related small talk.”) Butina also has ties to Paul Erickson, a G.O.P. operative who has reportedly bragged about advising Trump and whose background aligns with the description of “U.S. Person 1” in the indictment. Butina and Torshin allegedly used their gun-rights group as a way to connect with Republican officials in the United States; Erickson, former N.R.A. president David Keene, and former Wisconsin sheriff David Clarke attended a December 2015 trip to Moscow funded by the organization. (Erickson was not identified in court records and has not been charged.)
For the record, Butina also had ties — as in they used to date — to former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne who was part of the Oval Office meeting/argument with Trump and WH Counsel Pat Cippillone over election fraud. Barely an hour after that meeting ended, Trump tweeted out the call for a rally on January 6. Hmmm...
Flynn illegally took $45,000 from Russia without authorization from the Pentagon and sat right next to Putin at an RT Event, then later tried to broker a deal with Russia to provide Nuclear Power Plants for Saudi Arabia, [using a sanctioned Russian company for security] as well as lying about his conversations with former Russian ambassador Kislyak.
WASHINGTON — Whistleblowers from within President Donald Trump's National Security Council have told a congressional committee that efforts by former national security adviser Michael Flynn to transfer sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia may have violated the law, and investigators fear Trump is still considering it, according to a new report obtained by NBC News.
The House Oversight Committee has formally opened an investigation into the matter, releasing an interim staff report that adds new details to previous public accounts of how Flynn sought to push through the nuclear proposal on behalf of a group he had once advised. Tom Barrack, a prominent Trump backer with business ties to the Middle East, also became involved in the project, the report says.
Flynn was fired for lying to FBI agent Peter Strozk about discussing sanctions with Kislyak. After he left, his former staff on the NSC attempted to have the sanctions against Russia dropped at least three separate times, first trying to drop them just for “Russian Oil” which would have done wonders for the $500 Billion deal between Rosneft and Exxon for drilling in the Black Sea which had just been inked by fresh new Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. These attempts alarmed the State Department so greatly they rushed to Congress to have the law changed so that sanctions couldn’t be dropped by Trump alone.
Carter Page was talking to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dvorkovich.
The testimony reveals new details about how Page kept people in the campaign informed about interactions he had with Russians, as well as more details about his Russian contacts beyond his encounter with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich during his July 2016 trip.
[...]
But an email Page sent to Trump campaign officials suggests he might have gone beyond simply giving the campaign a heads up, according to an excerpt read by Rep. Jackie Speier, D-California.
“Please let me know if you have any reservations or thoughts on how you’d prefer me to focus these remarks,” Page wrote in an email to Trump campaign officials.
And with Rosneft exec Baranov.
Page also testifies that he met with Andrey Baranov, Rosneft’s head of investor relations and a senior aide to Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin. Page claims that Baranov gave him “an investor relations presentation,” but their discussions involved “nothing more substantive than that.”
According to Page’s testimony Baranov told him about an upcoming sale of 19.5% of Rosneft’s stock (this is a point that was specifically noted in the Steele Dossier, except it says that Page was told about the 19.5% stock sale by Sechin) However, Rosneft is a sanctioned company and an American couldn’t possibly profit from such information. Unless *somebody* dropped the sanctions that is. Who would possibly do that?
Michael Cohen and Felix Sater were in contact with Dmitri Peskov over the Trump Tower Moscow project [which would have used a sanctioned Russian bank for financing. Am I sensing a pattern here?] all based on a letter of intent which had been signed personally by Trump. [“I have no deals in Russia!”]
A Trump Organization executive emailed a Kremlin aide during President Donald Trump’s run for the White House seeking help on a “stalled” Trump Tower Moscow plan, The Washington Post reported Monday.
Michael Cohen, a Trump lawyer who was then an executive vice president at the Trump Organization, reached out to Dmitry Peskov, the top spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower – Moscow project in Moscow City,” Cohen wrote. “Without getting into lengthy specifics. the communication between our two sides has stalled.”
“As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon,” he wrote.
Trump, Cohen and Peskov all lied about this communication until they were finally caught.
Cohen and Sater also tried to negotiate a “Peace Deal” between Russia and Ukraine — which would have required Ukraine to give Russia everything they wanted including Crimea— and which would have ultimately dropped sanctions against Russia. Funny how that subject keeps coming up, ain’t it?
Five of these guys — Cohen, Stone, Flynn, Papadopoulos, and Rick Gates associate Alex Van Der Zwaan — all went to prison for lying under oath about conversations with Russians. Why in the world would they be willing to risk prison by lying about talking to Russians? I wonder…
Jeff Sessions also lied under oath during his confirmation about not knowing “any members of the campaign reaching out to Russians” when he was in the room when Papadopoulos publicly announced that was exactly what he was doing and Sessions openly supported the idea, plus Sessions himself met with Kislyak three separate times during the campaign — at a Trump campaign event and during the RNC convention away from his own offices — however the FBI and DOJ decided to completely ignore this and didn’t seek perjury charges.
The truth is that Mueller was prevented from indicting Trump due to OLC Rules. He was also prevented from doing a full Counter-intelligence investigation of Trump and his associates by Rod Rosenstein who lied to Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe about this, because otherwise McCabe would have done it on his own.
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia.
The special counsel who finished the investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, secured three dozen indictments and convictions of some top Trump advisers, and he produced a report that outlined Russia’s wide-ranging operations to help get Mr. Trump elected and the president’s efforts to impede the inquiry.
But law enforcement officials never fully investigated Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Russia, even though some career F.B.I. counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed such a national security threat that they took the extraordinary step of opening an inquiry into them. Within days, the former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere.
[...]
Mr. Rosenstein never told Mr. McCabe about his decision, leaving the F.B.I. with the impression that the special counsel would take on the investigation into the president as part of his broader duties. Mr. McCabe said in an interview that had he known Mr. Mueller would not continue the inquiry, he would have had the F.B.I. perform it.
“We opened this case in May 2017 because we had information that indicated a national security threat might exist, specifically a counterintelligence threat involving the president and Russia,” Mr. McCabe said. “I expected that issue and issues related to it would be fully examined by the special counsel team. If a decision was made not to investigate those issues, I am surprised and disappointed. I was not aware of that.”
[...]
“It was first and foremost a counterintelligence case,” Mr. McCabe said. “Could the president actually be the point of coordination between the campaign and the Russian government? Could the president actually be maintaining some sort of inappropriate relationship with our most significant adversary in the world?”
The answer to both those questions is “Yes.” Helsinki proved that.
This is why Mueller never did a full examination of the Steele Dossier and I know of no definitive examination of its claims — except mine — because he didn’t have authority to do so. He was only focused on criminal violations, not counter-intelligence — and that is why he ultimately didn’t even try to answer the “collusion” question. Collusion isn’t a crime. But he did find that the Trump campaign was highly interested in the actions of Russians during the election.
Mueller report Page 5:
The presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump ("Trump Campaign" or "Campaign") showed interest in WikiLeaks' s releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton. Beginning in June 2016, [Redacted] forecast to senior Campaign officials that WikiLeaks would release information damaging to candidate Clinton. WikiLeaks' s first release came in July 2016. Around the same time, candidate Trump announced that he hoped Russia would recover emails described as missing from a private server used by Clinton when she was Secretary of State he later said that he was speaking sarcastically.
[...]
Page 61:
Throughout 2016, the Trump Campaign expressed interest in Hillary Clinton's private email server and whether approximately 30,000 emails from that server had in fact been permanently destroyed, as reported by the media. Several individuals associated with the Campaign were contacted in 2016 about various efforts to obtain the missing Clinton emails and other stolen material in support of the Trump Campaign. Some of these contacts were met with skepticism, and nothing came of them; others were pursued to some degree. The investigation did not find evidence that the Trump Campaign recovered any such Clinton emails, or that these contacts were part of a coordinated effort between Russia and the Trump Campaign.
Ultimately he found 8 examples of obstruction of justice by Trump and stated that he was "Not Exonerated."
US President Donald Trump's claim that he was "totally exonerated" by special counsel Robert Mueller was rejected by Mr Mueller in a hearing on Wednesday.
Mr Mueller said he had not exonerated Mr Trump of obstruction of justice.
The former FBI director spent two years probing alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, but did not establish collusion in a crime.
He concluded that Russia had interfered in the election with the intention of benefitting Mr Trump's campaign.
Mr Trump frequently criticised the special counsel investigation during its investigation, branding it a "witch hunt". Responding to Mr Mueller's testimony on Wednesday, he said: "This was a great day for me."
In all, 35 people and three companies were charged by the special counsel on matters relating both directly and indirectly to alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. No members of the Trump family were charged.
Mr Mueller and his team concluded that they were unable to charge the president with a crime, but could not exonerate him either.
Repeat after me: “Trump was NOT exonerated.”
However, Mueller wasn't able to charge and prove a conspiracy with the Russians because so many Trumpers *lied* under oath about talking to Russians. He needed a cooperating witness and although he did have Rick Gates, that wasn’t enough. Nearly all of them — except Gates and Cohen — were later pardoned by Trump. And thus, they succeeded in their cover-up. [Golf Clap.]
Mueller ultimately indicted 13 members of Russian Intelligence for their illegal hacking operations against the DNC, DCCC and John Podesta and 12 more Russians for pushing Pro-Trump and anti-Hillary propaganda troll farm data on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram ultimately reaching 180 Million Americans, which was about 400% of what was needed to change the election outcome.
The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion. Evidence of Russian government operations began to surface in mid-2016. In June, the Democratic National Committee and its cyber response team publicly announced that Russian hackers had compromised its computer network. Releases of hacked materials-hacks that public reporting soon attributed to the Russian government-began that same month. Additional releases followed in July through the organization WikiLeaks, with further releases in October and November.
[...]
Beginning in March 2016, units of the Russian Federation' s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) hacked the computers and email accounts of organizations, employees,and volunteers supporting the Clinton Campaign, including the email account of campaign chairman John Podesta. Starting in April 2016, the GRU hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The GRU targeted hundreds of email accounts used by Clinton Campaign employees, advisors, and volunteers. In total, the GRU stole hundreds of thousands of documents from the compromised email accounts and networks. 109 The GRU later released stolen ClintonCampaign and DNC documents through online personas, "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0," and later through the organization WikiLeaks. The release of the documents was designed and timed to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election and undermine the Clinton Campaign.
Bill Barr later dropped the case against the Russian troll farm — because reasons. Shocker. The rest of the Russian GRU operatives remain out of reach and beyond extradition.
When Mueller’s investigation was finished, Bill Barr then really jumped into things and grossly distorted his findings.
WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Thursday sharply criticized Attorney General William P. Barr’s handling of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, saying that Mr. Barr put forward a “distorted” and “misleading” account of its findings and lacked credibility on the topic.
Mr. Barr could not be trusted, Judge Reggie B. Walton said, citing “inconsistencies” between the attorney general’s statements about the report when it was secret and its actual contents that turned out to be more damaging to President Trump. Mr. Barr’s “lack of candor” called into question his “credibility and, in turn, the department’s” assurances to the court, Judge Walton said.
[...]
The differences between the report and Mr. Barr’s description of it “cause the court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller report to the contrary,” wrote Judge Walton, an appointee of President George W. Bush.
[...]
The attorney general issued an initial four-page letter in March 2019 — two days after receiving the 381-page Mueller report — that purported to summarize its principal conclusions. But within days, Mr. Mueller sent letters to Mr. Barr protesting that he had distorted its findings and asking him to swiftly release the report’s own summaries. Instead, Mr. Barr made the report public only weeks later, after a fuller review to black out sensitive material.
Among the issues Judge Walton flagged: Mr. Barr declared that the special counsel had not found that the Trump campaign had conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, and left it at that.
But while Mr. Mueller did conclude that he found insufficient evidence to charge any Trump associates with conspiring with the Russians, Mr. Barr omitted that the special counsel had identified multiple contacts between Trump campaign officials and people with ties to the Russian government and that the campaign expected to benefit from Moscow’s interference.
So as you can see most of the bias here was in Trump’s favor — but what about the claims that there was bias in favor of Clinton?
The FBI Inspector General did not find that there was any bias in favor of Hillary in her investigation, he specifically found the Peter Strozk and Lisa Page pushed to investigate her *more* aggressively rather than less. He also didn't find that either of them showed any investigation bias *against* Trump in the Crossfire Hurricane case - they just didn't like him much personally.
In particular, we were concerned about text messages exchanged by FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, Special Counsel to the Deputy Director, that potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions were impacted by bias or improper considerations. As we describe in Chapter Twelve of our report, most of the text messages raising such questions pertained to the Russia investigation, which was not a part of this review. Nonetheless, the suggestion in certain Russia-related text messages in August 2016 that Strzok might be willing to take official action to impact presidential candidate Trump’s electoral prospects caused us to question the earlier Midyear investigative decisions in which Strzok was involved, and whether he took specific actions in the Midyear investigation based on his political views. As we describe Chapter Five of our report, we found that Strzok was not the sole decision maker for any of the specific Midyear investigative decisions we examined in that chapter.
We further found evidence that in some instances Strzok and Page advocated for more aggressive investigative measures in the Midyear investigation, such as the use of grand jury subpoenas and search warrants to obtain evidence.
There were clearly tensions and disagreements in a number of important areas between Midyear agents and prosecutors. However, we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed in Chapter Five, or that the justifications offered for these decisions were pretextual.
Let’s repeat again here: Search Warrants. Plural. As Agent Strozk has recently stated — there were several search warrants served against Former First Lady Hillary Clinton. That would have been the very first time that a former First Lady had to endure search warrants. And yet no one jumped up and started threatening the FBI over it — imagine that?
Oh, and on the “Classified Documents” that Clinton had in her email? Most of them were wrongly marked classified when in fact, they were not due to human error.
At a regular briefing for reporters Wednesday, Kirby said State is aware of two instances in the set of roughly 30,000 messages turned over to the agency by Clinton where classification markings appeared in the emails. However, he said those were mistakes where staff failed to remove the notations while preparing background and talking points for Clinton in a planned phone call with a foreign official.
"It appears that those...that those markings were a human error. They didn’t need to be there. Because once the secretary had decided to make the call, the process is then to move the call sheet, to change its markings to unclassified and deliver it to the secretary in a form that he or she can use," Kirby said. "And best we can tell on these occasions, the markings — the confidential markings — was simply human error. Because the decision had already been made, they didn’t need to be made on the email."
Kirby said such "call sheets" are often treated as classified when being prepared but as unclassified when forwarded to the secretary for his or her use.
So that’s a thing that didn’t happen in the case of Trump’s dumpster pile of documents did it?
Just for the record having your private email — or server — is perfectly legal when working for the government. Installing it was Huma Abedine’s idea so she’d have her own servername of clintonmail.com instead of HillaryClinton@blackberry.com. Colin Powell used AOL. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump used Trump Server accounts while working in the White House. The issue with Clinton was that after her lawyers had scoured her emails for any messages that were to and from the government, or that referenced “Benghazi”, her lawyers asked her if she needed to keep anything and she said “No.” That happened months before Congress issued a subpoena for her emails, but the IT guy who took care of her support forgot one leftover copy of the email archive — and he didn’t remember to delete it until later after the subpoena, which he honestly didn’t even know about. It’s convoluted, but these are the reasons she wasn’t prosecuted — it was a series of accidents and errors that caused all this, not malice on her part. Colin Powell just deleted his AOL account when he left the government and said any emails of his they needed should already be on the State Dept server. Go fish. Shrug.
Speaking of which, Hillary’s server was never successfully hacked because she had personal support people looking after it. There were some attempts, but none were successful. On the other hand on top of the DNC and DCCC the GRU hacked the State Department Email Servers as well as the White House email server. If she had a state.gov account instead of using her blackberry — it could have been compromised.
Anyhoo on the issue of the Steele Dossier, it had very little to do with the start of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation because it had *already* been started on June 16, 2016 after Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer reported that Trump aide George Papadopoulos had been told by Russian operatives that they had hacked the DNC for Hillary's emails almost two months before the DNC publicly revealed that it had happened. When Steele later talked to the FBI he still knew nothing about Papadopoulos, the FBI told him.
The wide-ranging investigation into Donald Trump's business activities and ties to Russia began with a protocol-breaking interview with Alexander Downer.
The former Foreign Minister and then High Commissioner to the United Kingdom spoke to the FBI in the first few days of the investigation, the New York Times reports. Downer was granted permission from Canberra to break diplomatic protocol to be interviewed by agents in London in August 2016.
Downer spoke with the FBI about a conversation he had at a London wine bar with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that May.
Papadopoulos purportedly told Downer that Russia had accessed thousands of embarrassing emails sent by Hillary Clinton.
When those emails started being released by Wikileaks, Australian officials contacted their American counterparts, triggering the FBI investigation initially named Crossfire Hurricane.
Papadopoulos was told about the Hillary/DNC emails in April about the same time it was discovered by the DNC. His conversation with Downer in the wine bar happened in May. The first entry in the Steele Dossier wasn’t even written until June 20th, four days after Downer talked to the FBI, and the first time anyone in the government even saw a copy, which was Deputy AG Bruce Ohr, wasn’t until July 5th about two weeks later. There’s no way they could have started an investigation based on the Steele Dossier two weeks before they ever saw a copy of it.
Still, there is almost no chance that George didn't tell the rest of the campaign about the Clinton hack, his whole entire job was to report on the success of his communications with Russians, but all copies of that email have "magically disappeared."
A summary outlining the guilty plea of former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos says an unnamed “professor" with ties to the Russian government told him around April 26, 2016, that he had learned that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton, including the emails.
That was just weeks after Russian government hackers gained access to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's emails in March 2016 and nearly two months before the Democratic National Committee successfully expelled the hackers from its computer system, where they had been since the previous year, according to Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity firm the party hired to investigate the hack.
[...]
The summary contains no indication that Papadopoulos passed the information about the emails on to the campaign, but the document says he continued to message the senior policy adviser and a “high-ranking campaign official” about his contacts with the Russians until at least August 2016.
It was during that period that another meeting was held between Trump campaign officials and a Kremlin-affiliated lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, at Trump Tower in New York. That meeting, on June 9, 2016, was attended by then Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Trump's son Donald Jr.
However, there is evidence that Papadopoulos did tell the campaign about the Russian email hack, even though the campaign apparently went through an effort to hide this fact, because he admitted in a nightclub that Jeff Sessions had told him to “find out everything about the emails.”
On Thursday at a Chicago nightclub, Papadopoulos had some drinks and, in a conversation with a new acquaintance, allegedly made new and explosive claims about Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Papadopoulos, according to this new acquaintance, said that Sessions was well aware of the contact between Papadopoulos and Joseph Mifsud, an academic from Malta with high-level connections in Russia. Papadopoulos’ indictment revealed that Mifsud had told Papadopoulos that the Russians had “‘dirt’ on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails.'”
Jason Wilson, a computer engineer who lives in Chicago, told ThinkProgress that Papadopoulos said during their conversation that “Sessions encouraged me” to find out anything he could about the hacked Hillary Clinton emails that Mifsud had mentioned.
Strangely, it appears that he never told Mueller about this. But then again, he is a convicted liar.
There is still, besides the fact that Crossfire Hurricane was already in progress, the argument that members of the Clinton campaign wanted to secretly “plant” the Steele Dossier and other bogus claims with the FBI in order to start a false investigation of Trump. The problem with that idea besides the fact that FBI rules over elections would have prevented them from publicizing such an investigation until well after November — and we know this because they didn’t publicize Crossfire Hurricane until almost a year after it started — is that people in Perkins Coie who paid Fusion GPS for oppo research on Trump didn’t even know that they had sub-hired Steele to gather information about Russia and Trump. Also, Fusion never even shared what Steele found with Perkins or the Clinton Campaign, instead they took it straight to the FBI — so exactly how could they “plant” something they didn't even know about?
Contrary to the conspiracy theories that the right later spread, Simpson and Fritsch write that they never met or spoke with Clinton. “As far as Fusion knew, Clinton herself had no idea who they were. To this day, no one in the company has ever met or spoken to her,” the book reads. As I reported, although Steele went to the F.B.I. with his findings out of a sense of duty and, by the late summer of 2016, knew that the F.B.I. was seriously investigating Trump’s Russian ties, the communication channels were so siloed that the Clinton campaign was unaware of these facts. Far from conspiring in a plot, the Clinton team had no hard evidence that the F.B.I. was investigating its opponent, even as its own opposition researcher was feeding dirt to the F.B.I. As one top Clinton campaign official told me when I wrote about Steele, “If I’d known the F.B.I. was investigating Trump, I would have been shouting it from the rooftops!”
Special Counsel John Durham has been chasing this particular snipe by filing charges for lying to the FBI against Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussman claiming that he failed to tell the FBI that his complaint that a Russian Bank Server was strangely pinging a pair of Trump and Devos servers was really a “planted story” from Perkins. It didn’t occur to Durham that Sussman didn’t mention Perkins because they had nothing to do with it and that the allegation was true, even if weird. Consequently that case went the way you would expect for your basic cock and bull conspiracy theory — it crashed and burned.
During a two-week trial in federal court in Washington, Durham’s prosecutors argued that Sussmann was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and an internet executive when he took two thumb drives of data and white papers on the purported link to FBI General Counsel James Baker about six weeks before the 2016 presidential election.
Sussmann’s defense said the case was flawed on a variety of grounds, including that prosecutors could not prove with certainty exactly what the cybersecurity lawyer and former federal prosecutor said to Baker.
Sussmann’s attorneys also stressed that there was no evidence the Clinton campaign authorized Sussmann to go to the FBI, although he and researchers working for Clinton appeared to have spent an extensive amount of time dealing with the server allegations and were actively encouraging The New York Times to write about the issue in the closing weeks of the presidential race.
[...]
In a brief statement outside the courthouse shortly after the verdict, Sussmann thanked his lawyers and said he views the not guilty verdict as a vindication.
“I told the truth to the FBI and the jury clearly recognized that with their unanimous verdict today,” Sussmann told reporters. “Despite being falsely accused, I believe that justice ultimately prevailed in my case.”
Sussmann’s defense team declined to address the crowd of reporters and cameras at the court, but issued a written statement blasting the prosecution.
“Michael Sussmann should never have been charged in the first place. This is a case of extraordinary prosecutorial overreach. And we believe that today’s verdict sends an unmistakable message to anyone who cares to listen: politics is no substitute for evidence, and politics has no place in our system of justice,” Berkowitz and Bosworth wrote.
So the argument that the Clinton campaign tried to falsely plant allegations that Trump was linked with Russia — which he really was in several different ways — failed. Totally. It’s a nothing burger. It flatly didn’t happen.
The only legitimate complaint - and prosecution - of anyone in the FBI was for the guy who had a typo in an email saying Carter Page hadn't been a CIA informant, when in fact he had.
The Justice Department inspector general last month criticized the FBI for a series of failures in its applications to the FISA court, including making statements that left an "inaccurate impression" and withholding potentially exculpatory information.
The report also accused a low-level FBI lawyer of doctoring a document used to build the agency's application for FISA surveillance on Page. The lawyer is now under criminal investigation, and has since resigned from the FBI.
The key point of the reason Page was an informant is that years before Russian spies had tried to recruit him as an asset.
Russian intelligence agents working in New York City met with Carter Page, a one-time foreign-policy adviser to President Donald Trump, and attempted to recruit the business consultant as a spy in 2013.
While the effort was ultimately unsuccessful as the FBI broke up the spy ring in 2015, the meetings between Page and the Russian intelligence officers constitute one of the most substantive ties to date between a member of the Trump camp and Russian intelligence. Those meetings will likely add to the urgency of the multiple ongoing investigations of the administration’s ties to Moscow and the campaign’s possible coordination with Russian intelligence to tip the election in Trump’s favor.
[...]
In 2013, though, Russian intelligence took a dim view of Page. In the 2015 complaint that details an FBI investigation into a three-man Russian spy ring, the foreign agents describe their attempt to recruit Page, describing him as an ambitious climber eager to make money in Russia’s energy sector.
“He got hooked on Gazprom,” Victor Podobnyy, an officer of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, told his boss, Igor Sporyshev. “It’s obvious that he wants to earn lots of money.”
Page did work with the FBI and CIA on that case - but he also told the spies he was in contact with the FBI so nearly all of them fled the country and only one of them was arrested and prosecuted. So I'm not really sure his being an informant proves he was exactly loyal to the CIA and FBI since he largely blew their case up by blabbing. What all of this shows however, is that the FBI had damn good reason to surveil Page as potentially being a target for Russian recruitment, because — regardless of Christopher Steele and his dossier — it had already happened before.
In nearly all these cases the FBI — largely through Rosenstein and Barr — helped Trump. They covered for him. I don't at all see where they were "Out to get him" especially since from the start the FBI was "Trumpland."
Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.
Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.
“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.
The agent called the bureau “Trumplandia”, with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party’s national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.
Sources who disputed the depth of Trump’s internal support agreed that the FBI is now in parlous political territory. Justice department officials – another current target of FBI dissatisfaction – have said the bureau disregarded longstanding rules against perceived or actual electoral interference when Comey wrote to Congress to say it was reviewing newly discovered emails relating to Clinton’s personal server.
And it’s effectively still Trumpland as shown by this exchange between Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and FBI Director Christopher Wray about how the FBI handled the Kavanaugh investigation — which was to take their direction entirely from Trump’s White House.
Whitehouse: As you know, we are now entering the fourth year of a frustrating saga that began with an August 2019 letter from me and Senator Chris Coons, regarding the Kavanaugh supplemental background investigation. And I’d like to try to get that matter wrapped up. First, is it true that after Kavanaugh-related tips were separated from regular tip-line traffic, they were forwarded to White House counsel without investigation?
Wray: I apologize in advance that it has been frustrating for you. We have tried to be clear about our process. So when it comes to the tip line, we wanted to make sure that the White House had all the information we have, so when the hundreds of calls started coming in, we gathered those up, reviewed them, and provided them to the White House—
Whitehouse: Without investigation?
Wray [long pause]: We reviewed them and then provided them to—
Whitehouse: You reviewed them for purposes of separating them from tip-line traffic, but did not further investigate the ones that related to Kavanaugh, correct?
Wray: Correct.
Whitehouse: Is it also true that, in that supplemental B.I. [background investigation], the FBI took direction from the White House as to whom the FBI would question, and even what questions the FBI could ask?
Wray: So, it is true that, consistent with the longstanding process that we have had going all the way back to at least the Bush administration, the Obama administration, the Trump administration, and continue to follow currently under the Biden administration, that in a limited supplemental B.I., we take direction from the requesting entity, which in this case was the White House, as to what follow-up they want. That’s the direction we’ve followed. That’s the direction we’ve consistently followed throughout the decades, frankly. You asked specifically about who and what?
Whitehouse: Yeah. I said, Is it true?
Wray: It is true as to the who. I’m not sure, as I sit here, whether it’s also true as to the “what questions,” but it is true as to the who we interviewed.
Another example is that the FBI was resistant to implementing the search warrant on Mar A Lago.
The FBI stubbornly pushed back against federal prosecutors’ plans to search former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for classified documents last year, according to a news report.
Despite ample evidence that Trump had defied a subpoena for return of the documents, senior agents suggested the Justice Department should accept false claims by Trump’s lawyers that he had returned all the top secret materials, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.
“We are not the presidential records police,” Steven D’Antuono, the chief of the FBI’s Washington D.C. field office, reportedly told prosecutors.
The FBI instead wanted to get Trump’s lawyers to agree to a consensual search, a step that would have given the former president the chance to move, hide or destroy the documents.
The infighting resulted in a significant delay between the time prosecutors had evidence that Trump defied the subpoena and when the FBI eventually carried out the explosive search with the blessing of a federal judge on Aug. 8.
The truth is that Jeff Sessions is a Republican. Rod Rosenstein is a Republican. James Comey is a former Republican. Andrew McCabe is a Republican. Peter Strozk is a Republican. Robert Mueller is a Republican. Bill Barr is a Republican. Christopher Wray is a Republican. Just about anyone who touched any of these cases — was a Republican. The OLC gave Trump carte blanche that made him completely immune from prosecution and Bill Barr by falsely declaring Mueller found “No Collusion” — even though he wasn’t looking for collusion because Rod Rosenstein wouldn’t let him — sealed the deal.
Up until now the FBI has repeatedly protected Trump — there is no other conclusion.
Perhaps, finally, that has changed.
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