Said Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney: “And I would have to imagine it would make it untenable for him to be president but it would also be the political scandal of all time.” | Ex-FBI Officials Say Spy Inquiry into President Trump Is ‘Uncharted Territory’ - Saturday January 12th, 2019 at 9:15 AM The Daily Beast Latest Articles



Said Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney: “And I would have to imagine it would make it untenable for him to be president but it would also be the political scandal of all time.” | Ex-FBI Officials Say Spy Inquiry into President Trump Is ‘Uncharted Territory’ - Saturday January 12th, 2019 at 9:15 AM The Daily Beast Latest Articles


Ex-FBI Officials Say Spy Inquiry into President Trump Is ‘Uncharted Territory’

1 Share

Signed in

OFF THE MAP

Ex-FBI Officials Say Spy Inquiry into President Trump Is ‘Uncharted Territory’

If the Times’ story is right, retired agents and officials say that means the highest levels of Justice and the FBI knew the president was—and may still be—under investigation.






Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast





The White House is blasting as “absurd” a blockbuster new report that the FBI opened an investigation into the whether the president of the United States was working on behalf of the Kremlin. But respected former FBI special agents tell The Daily Beast such a momentous step would not be taken without “serious and substantial evidence.”
They told The Daily Beast that the senior-most levels of the FBI and Justice Department would have known about an event they considered without precedent in bureau history.
“This is uncharted territory,” said Ali Soufan, a retired FBI counterterrorism special agent. “I don’t believe that it had happened before… Ever.”
On Friday night, The New York Times reported that FBI agents opened a counterintelligence investigation in May of 2017 into whether President Trump had been operating “on behalf of Russia against American interests.”
If the Times is correct, then the FBI overcame its reluctance to investigate Trump after he fired one of its own: former director James Comey, whom the president dismissed that same month. One implication of that timeline is that Robert Mueller, who was appointed as special counsel a week later, would have had access to their investigation for at least substantial portions of his own.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat on the committee that oversees the FBI, said the Times’ reporting was intriguing, and “another powerful piece of the mosaic” on Trump’s relationship with Russia.  
The Times’ revelations also may reignite Republican criticism of FBI officials who privately expressed concern about Trump while working on investigations concerning him. After text messages between former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and former counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok became public—revealing their criticism of Trump—congressional Republicans brought them in for grilling sessions. Page in particular faced protracted and ugly attacks from Fox News opinion hosts. And the president himself also tweeted numerous times about her, sarcastically calling her “the lovely Lisa Page.” But the Times’ reporting indicates they were far from alone in their concerns about Trump’s posture towards Russia.
“There are a variety of ways to gather information about foreign efforts to influence a U.S. official that don’t require the sensitive step of targeting that official’s communications, and those who are criticizing the FBI for pursuing a counterintelligence investigation are doing so without any knowledge of what investigative steps were actually undertaken,” a Justice Department trial attorney told The Daily Beast.
Mike German, another retired FBI special agent, said an investigation like this would likely have required assent from the very top of the Justice Department.
“It would be most likely that the highest levels of of the FBI and DOJ signed off on the investigation,” German said.
The FBI issues specific guidelines on how agents should handle different levels of counterintelligence investigations. A preliminary investigation requires a low standard of evidence, that “information or an allegation” exists as to a crime or security threat. A full investigation requires “specific and articulable facts” raising a “reasonable indication” of the same. Both are well short of the probable cause needed for an indictment. It is unclear which sort of investigation, if any, Trump was or is under.
“Of course, with the U.S. president as a subject, the threshold would be much higher than normal,” German said.
The Justice Department trial attorney agreed, saying, “foreign efforts to influence presidential candidates are of course supremely serious.”
Soufan added that to open a case “on any official, or high-ranking official, requires some serious deliberations.” He continued: “Imagine if it is a case on the president of the U.S. acting as an agent of a hostile foreign power.”
Soufan went on to note that to open up a counterintelligence investigation into Trump would require “serious and substantial” levels of evidence of a relationship with a hostile foreign power.
It’s unclear whether or not that investigation is over. Former Justice Department officials told The Daily Beast that counterintelligence probes, especially those into a president, would take years to complete.
"They take a long time. They're not over quickly. And based on the president’s public statements and actions, I think you have to open a cointel investigation,” said one former senior DOJ official with knowledge of such counterintelligence investigations. “You might never know that it's resolved. These cases often never see the inside of a courtroom. The findings are often kept within the intelligence community, indexed and filed away.”
Trump’s attorney in the Mueller probe, the former New York City mayor and ex-U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani, told the Times that, “The fact that it goes back a year and a half and nothing came of it that showed a breach of national security means they found nothing.” He did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Beast. The FBI did not comment for this story. The Department of Justice declined to comment as did the Special Counsel’s Office.
The White House was quick to lash out, however. “Unlike President Obama, who let Russia and other foreign adversaries push America around, President Trump has actually been tough on Russia,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement, adding that the Times report was “absurd.”
But just the idea of the sitting U.S. president being probed as a possible agent of a foreign nation, especially one like Russia, has former senior government officials and former prosecutors grasping for the right words to describe the news.
“It’s mind-blowing and even though it’s separate from criminal inquiry, any determination that the president of the U.S. had been or was a Russian agent would be out of The Manchurian Candidate,” said Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney. “And I would have to imagine it would make it untenable for him to be president but it would also be the political scandal of all time.”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

01/04/19 10:50 from Trump Investigations from Michael_Novakhov (32 sites) U.S. Manufacturing Activity Rebounds From Lowest in Two Years TheStreet.com U.S. retail sales unexpectedly slipped by 0.2% in February on a seasonally adjusted basis, in a sign that consumers might be cutting back... | CNN's YouTube Videos: Democrats to take action to obtain full Mueller report | Democrats to prepare subpoenas for full Mueller report - KATU 01/04/19 10:37 from Trump Investigations

“A Lot of Funny Business” - Lawyers: Teen girl Weiner sexted wanted to affect election | How did these 650,000 emails get into the Abedin -Weiner laptop? This question remains open for almost three years now, and no answer in sight. - 6:35 AM 2/17/2019

7:54 AM 4/1/2019 - Trump Investigations News In 250 Brief Posts

The Latest Posts - The Trump Investigations - Review Of News | Pages

10:51 AM 1/26/2019 - "Nice job, Vlad! | Happy to please you, Boss!" - Putin "looks" like an agent of Germany or the New Abwehr - Michael Novakhov (Mike Nova) on New Abwehr Hypothesis of the Operation Trump

The Trump Investigations [Inoreader digest]

9:37 AM 7/19/2019 - Melania Knauss Trump is a lesbian

American Nazi and Abwehr | German Espionage and Sabotage | Nazi Espionage: The Abwehr and SD - U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis | U.S. indicts 54 in Aryan group

The Trump Investigations [Inoreader digest]