A Second Special Counsel is needed to investigate FBI in depth! - M.N. - 2:22 PM 1/13/2019
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Ongoing reminder: a story whose back story the NYT might usefully explore, for its benefit and ours.— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) December 2, 2017
Ran one week before election. pic.twitter.com/wGRKsDT9iT
M.N. In many people's, and my own humble opinion, if we really want to understand this unprecedented crisis,
A Second Special Counsel is needed
to investigate in depth:- FBI in general: its structure, institutional mission, performance, moda operandi, roles in society and government, state of overall health, risks, and the assessed level of infiltration by the hostile and other intelligence services and crime groups.
- The Obama's FBI in particular, and its role in the present mess.
- New York Branch of FBI specifically, and their role in the Elections of 2016 and Weiner Affair.
- The state of the Counterintelligence Services, and all the other related and relevant issues.
No glory in James Comey getting away with his abuse of FBI power
The Hill-Dec 15, 2018
In his interview in New York City, Nicole Wallace asked him, “It's hard to imagine two FBI agents ending up in the State Room. ... Consider his conduct during the 2016 presidential election, leading up to his controversial ... It prevents rogue or impulsive actions and maintains a clear chain of command within ...
How Rogue Agents in the FBI's NY Field Office Helped Elect Trump
Washington Monthly-Dec 10, 2018
How Rogue Agents in the FBI's NY Field Office Helped Elect Trump ... into Hillary Clinton's emails that tilted the election in Trump's favor. ... coming from the FBI's New York field office during the 2016presidential campaign.
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"This was four days before the election. That appearance prompted Reps. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and John Conyers, D-Mich., at the time the ranking members of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Judiciary Committee (respectively), to ask the inspector general of the Department of Justice to investigate the leaks Giuliani was bragging about receiving. The result of that investigation was assumed to be included in the now-famous I.G.'s report released last week. It was not.
This is odd and unlike this I.G., Michael Horowitz, who has a reputation for thoroughness. It's particularly odd since within the report there is considerable evidence of hostility to Hillary Clinton among the group of FBI agents based in or around around the New York office, but Horowitz doesn't summarize any of it or offer any conclusion. Some analysts have assumed this means there is an ongoing investigation, but there is no official word to that effect. This question has just been left hanging out there, unresolved...
A cabal of FBI agents in the New York office loyal to Rudy Giuliani apparently hectored their bosses, leaked to the press and urged former agents to go on television to put the Department of Justice and the FBI under pressure to act harshly against Hillary Clinton, even when if was outside the norms, rules and laws of the department. They were successful beyond their wildest dreams."
A cabal of FBI agents in the New York office loyal to Rudy Giuliani apparently hectored their bosses, leaked to the press and urged former agents to go on television to put the Department of Justice and the FBI under pressure to act harshly against Hillary Clinton, even when if was outside the norms, rules and laws of the department. They were successful beyond their wildest dreams."
I think everyone remembers that Rudy Giuliani played a significant role in the Trump presidential campaign and was especially visible during the last month or so. On Oct. 25, 2016, he made a couple of TV appearances in which he hinted broadly that the campaign had an October surprise coming.
On "Fox & Friends" he was asked if Trump had anything planned other than "inspiring rallies" and he said "yes" (at the 8:50 mark). When asked what that was, he responded this way:
“Heh-heh-heh,” Mr. Giuliani laughed. “You’ll see.”Appearing to enjoy his own coy reply, Mr. Giuliani resumed chuckling: “Ha-ha-ha.”“When will this happen?” Ms. Earhardt asked.“We got a couple of surprises left,” Mr. Giuliani said, smiling.
Later that day he appeared on another show and gleefully reiterated his claim. You can see it at the two-minute mark in the following video:
<a href="https://youtu.be/L-4mDUS1a9w" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/L-4mDUS1a9w</a>
Two days later, then-FBI Director James Comey sent his notorious letter.
On Nov. 4, Salon's Sophia Tesfaye reported that Giuliani went on "Fox & Friends" again and openly bragged about that gambit:
He said he had expected it three or four weeks previous to that and had been hearing since July about FBI agents who were upset that Hillary Clinton wasn't being charged. He was angry that the Trump campaign couldn't get ahold of Clinton's medical records.
This was four days before the election. That appearance prompted Reps. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., and John Conyers, D-Mich., at the time the ranking members of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Judiciary Committee (respectively), to ask the inspector general of the Department of Justice to investigate the leaks Giuliani was bragging about receiving. The result of that investigation was assumed to be included in the now-famous I.G.'s report released last week. It was not.
This is odd and unlike this I.G., Michael Horowitz, who has a reputation for thoroughness. It's particularly odd since within the report there is considerable evidence of hostility to Hillary Clinton among the group of FBI agents based in or around around the New York office, but Horowitz doesn't summarize any of it or offer any conclusion. Some analysts have assumed this means there is an ongoing investigation, but there is no official word to that effect. This question has just been left hanging out there, unresolved.
On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee will hear testimony from Horowitz. One hopes the Democrats will be prepared to ask him about all this.
That isn't all the evidence by any means. Consider the big Bret Baier "scoop" on Fox News days before the election, when Baier claimed that sources had told him Clinton would be indicted after the election:
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Baier had to apologize for that report later, admitting that his supposed FBI sources "were wrong. But it was already out in the ether: Trump made it a central theme of his rallies, which were carried live by the networks so millions of people could hear them. As Kellyanne Conway said on MSNBC when asked if Trump would correct his claims, "Well, the damage is done to Hillary Clinton. No matter how it's being termed, the voters are hearing it for what it is, a culture of corruption."
It seems to have worked exactly as "someone" hoped it would.
Last Friday night, House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes, R-Calif., once again proving that he's a few pecans short of a fruitcake, did it again. He told Laura Ingraham that he had received leaks from Trump-supporting FBI agents as well:
The Intelligence Committee's ranking Democrat, Adam Schiff of California, said on Sunday that he'd never heard anything about that before. So if this was a "whistleblower," the chairman forgot to share the evidence with his colleagues on the committee. Giuliani, meanwhile, has been on a tear, saying the whole top echelon of the FBI needs to be replaced with his friends, the "honest" New York FBI agents.
Horowitz's report concluded that the FBI played it straight in the Clinton email investigation, even as it showed that a couple of the investigators were hostile to Trump and that Comey was insubordinate and showed poor judgment. Whether Comey admits this or not, the report clearly suggests that his judgment was influenced by this cabal of FBI agents who were pressing for him to "lock her up."
The Republicans have been working the refs hard, and it's fair to conclude they may have worked Horowitz too. He focused on all the specious accusations of an anti-Trump conspiracy and left the more damning evidence of the FBI's successful sabotage of the Clinton campaign hovering between the lines.
Naturally, all this information about the FBI agents scheming to sabotage the Clinton campaign is being ignored in the press in favor of the sensational text message from Peter Strzok to his girlfriend Lisa Page after she lamented that Donald Trump might become president: "We will stop him." As Yogi Berra said, it's like déjà vu all over again. Once again the Trump team's actual misconduct is downplayed while petty misdeeds that feed the Trump narrative of grievance and victimization are emphasized.
A cabal of FBI agents in the New York office loyal to Rudy Giuliani apparently hectored their bosses, leaked to the press and urged former agents to go on television to put the Department of Justice and the FBI under pressure to act harshly against Hillary Clinton, even when if was outside the norms, rules and laws of the department. They were successful beyond their wildest dreams.
The media obliged them:
The media have done no serious introspection on this issue, and the dynamic continues to this day. There's a lot of critical coverage of Trump, but reporters will leap at any chance to "balance the scales," no matter how ludicrous. We have seen that once again this past week as the GOP handed the media the Strzok text as if they'd just just found the Ark of the Covenant.
The Republicans will be happy to spoon feed the press buckets of "oppo" to fill journalists' desire to be even-handed as soon as the next presidential campaign begins. The end result will be just as much a distortion of the facts as this inane narrative that poor Donald Trump was the victim of an FBI plot to deny him the presidency when the truth is that he won the election at least in part because the FBI sabotaged his opponent.
It's enough to give you a migraine. That's the idea.
Lying to Congress, misleading a special surveillance court, and failing to disclose conflicts of interest are among possible wrongdoing that a second special counsel could investigate in connection with allegations of a politicized, partisan Justice Department.
As special counsel Robert Mueller continues his investigation of alleged collusion with Russia by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, congressional Republicans are increasing pressure on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to probe aspects of the Justice Department’s disparate conduct toward the 2016 presidential candidates.
“The question is whether Sessions thinks crimes may have been committed,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation and a former Justice Department lawyer, told The Daily Signal.
The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General already was probing possible bias by Justice Department and FBI investigators during investigations of Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who would become his vanquished rival, in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>
Inspector General Michael Horowitz announced Wednesday that he has opened a review of the methods used by FBI and Justice officials to obtain a warrant to surveil a volunteer adviser to the Trump campaign.
The review by the inspector general’s office will include officials’ “compliance with legal requirements, and with applicable DOJ and FBI policies and procedures” in seeking the warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to a statement obtained by Fox News.
The inspector general also will look into “information that was known to the DOJ and the FBI” at the time “from or about an alleged FBI confidential source.”
That source apparently is Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent and FBI informant who put together a “dossier” of embarrassing information about Trump before the election.
The FBI and Justice Department used that document to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign adviser, according to information released by the House intelligence committee.
Last month, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, told The Daily Signal that there is evidence of conflict of interest and bias.
“Right now, there has been such a conflict of interest and perhaps some bias that we’ve seen in text messages and some of the email traffic that a special counsel is the only way to have a third-party, independent review of what’s going on,” Meadows said.
Much of the investigation came under scrutiny for possible political bias after anti-Trump texts and email messages between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page emerged. The messages referenced a conversation with then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and talked about the need for “insurance” in case Trump won the election.
Meadows said at the time that the inspector general’s review would not be sufficient.
“There is already their own internal review with the inspector general, but at this point, you need an independent third party,” Meadows said, adding:
An inspector general is part of the Department of Justice and FBI. They, quote, ‘have a wall between them and the department,’ but they actually work for the department. The other part of that is they can’t bring a prosecution. A special counsel actually could prosecute if there is wrongdoing.
On the recommendation of the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, Sessions fired McCabe two days before his scheduled retirement. The yet-to-be-released inspector general’s findings reportedly say McCabe leaked information about the investigation and then lied about it to the FBI.
“The simple behavior of Andrew McCabe shows how corrupted the investigation into Trump has become,” Adams said. “This raises the need for a new special counsel, but it needs to be someone nonpartisan, outside of Washington, D.C., and the Democratic cluster with the Justice Department.”
Adams noted more recent questions about whether then-FBI Director James Comey possibly gave misleading testimony under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee last May, just days before Trump fired him.
The questions emerged as a result of a statement by McCabe, who said Comey was aware he shared information with the media about the Trump investigation. Comey previously had testified under oath to Congress that he didn’t authorize leaking.
House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said his committee would subpoena information from the FBI to determine whether Comey was truthful.
Congressional committees and the inspector general have their limits, Adams said.
“The only way to get to the bottom of this is to haul people before a grand jury, and it needs to be a grand jury outside of D.C., that won’t look like a Bernie Sanders convention,” Adams said, referring to the partisan liberal Democratic bent of residents of the District of Columbia.
On March 15, Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, asked Sessions to name a special counsel. Joining him were three other committee members, Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas; Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; and Thom Tillis, R-N.C.
Their letter asked that a new special counsel work with the inspector general to look into whether the FBI misrepresented the facts regarding the “salacious” anti-Trump document prepared by Steele, the former British spy, that was financed by the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign.
FBI and Justice officials presented that document to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to make the case for a warrant to spy on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page because of alleged ties with Russia.
The senators also asked for a second special counsel to explore “improprieties in the FBI’s relationship with Christopher Steele [and] the potential conflicts of interest posed by the involvement of high-ranking DOJ official Bruce Ohr,” who is married to an employee of Fusion GPS, the opposition-research firm that employed Steele.
Grassley and the other three Republican senators noted that “there was an apparent unauthorized disclosure of classified information to the press.”
In the House, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., have both asked for a special counsel.
Their request followed a March 6 letter from Goodlatte and House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., asking for a probe of possible bias, whether the law was followed in pursuit of a FISA warrant, and how apparent conflicts of interest influenced decision-making in the investigation.
This report has been updated to include news of the inspector general’s expanded review.
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Sessions fires former FBI deputy director McCabe
Politico-Mar 16, 2018
Justice Department officials determined that “McCabe had made an ... "McCabe was a ringleader of rogue actors who were a shameful ...
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