Posted on 02/03/2018 10:24:39 AM PST by billorites
The memo appears to confirm suspicions that a FISA court warrant targeted Carter Page based on information in the dossier funded by Hillary Clinton's campaign.
What we have long suspected (see, e.g., here and here) has now been confirmed: The Obama Justice Department and the FBI used the unverified Steele dossier to convince a federal court to issue a warrant authorizing surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser. Confirmation came in the much-anticipated memorandum released today by the Republican-controlled House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
The memo states that the Obama administration concealed from the court that the dossier was commissioned and paid for by the political campaign of Donald Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Nor was the court informed that the dossier’s author, former British spy Christopher Steele, told a senior Justice Department official that he was “desperate” to prevent Trump from being elected president.
The dossier was a compilation of Steele’s reports, based on anonymous Russian sources. His informants provided information based on accounts that were multiple levels of hearsay removed from the events they purported to describe.
The FISA court warrant targeted Carter Page, who had volunteered to serve as a Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser. The memo relates that the warrant was originally issued on October 21, 2016, and re-authorized three times thereafter. Under FISA, warrants targeting American citizens lapse after 90 days. If you’re keeping score, that means a warrant based on claims that Trump was corruptly aligned with the Kremlin was renewed twice after Donald Trump became president.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) permits the FISA court to issue a surveillance warrant to monitor the communications of a target, including his stored emails and texts, if the Justice Department and FBI establish probable cause that a person is acting as an agent of a foreign power. In this instance, Page was alleged to be an agent of Russia. Because Page is an American citizen, FISA also required the government to show probable cause that Page’s purported clandestine activities on behalf of the Kremlin were in violation of federal criminal law.
The Steele dossier’s description of a Trump-Russia conspiracy with Page at its core alleges Page’s potential involvement in serious crimes: hacking, bribery, fraud, and racketeering. As I have previously explained (see the last section of this column), if the dossier was not used to claim that Page was involved in felony misconduct, it is difficult to fathom where such an allegation could have come from.
Obviously, the obscure Page was not the main target of the investigation. What animated the government was the possibility of Russian collusion with the Donald Trump presidential campaign. It is also what animated Steele in crafting the dossier. Yet, the Intelligence Committee’s memo notes former FBI director James Comey’s acknowledgement in June 2017 Senate testimony that these dossier allegations were “salacious and unverified.”
It appears that they always were. The FBI’s assistant director Bill Priestap told the committee that efforts to corroborate Steele were in their “infancy” when the first warrant was sought. Very shortly thereafter, following a Mother Jones interview of Steele published on October 31, 2016 (i.e., ten days after the initial warrant was issued), Steele was suspended and then terminated as an informant for violating his agreement not to disclose his status as an FBI informant. The memo says that after Steele’s termination, the bureau assessed the corroboration of his claims to be “minimal.”
Yet, high-ranking FBI and Justice Department officials continued to approve warrant applications to the FISA court based significantly on Steele’s claims. The memo states that, for the FBI, director James Comey approved the first three, and deputy director Andrew McCabe the last one; for the Justice Department, the warrant applications were approved by Deputy Attorneys General Sally Yates (of the Obama administration, presumably two times), Dana Boente (as “acting” DAG during the Trump administration), and Rod Rosenstein (President Trump’s appointed DAG).
On one occasion, according to the memo, the Justice Department and FBI attempted to address the lack of verification of the dossier’s claims by what turned out to be circular reliance on a media report. The news story, published on September 23, 2016, by Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff, was based on information from Steele. That is, the Justice Department represented to the court that the information it alleged in the FISA warrant application was reliable because it was independently corroborated by sources in Mr. Isikoff’s story. Unbeknownst to the FBI, Steele was Isikoff’s source.
Steele was retained for the Democrat-funded anti-Trump project by the research firm Fusion GPS. At Fusion, he collaborated with Nellie Ohr, the wife of then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr — a senior Justice Department official who worked closely with the deputy attorneys general who approved the FISA warrants. Steele met with Ohr both before and after he was terminated as an FBI source. In September 2016 (i.e., before the first warrant application), the memo recounts that Steele told Ohr he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.”
After formally terminating Steele, the FBI periodically interviewed Associate Deputy Attorney General Ohr, who reported on his meetings with Steele. In effect, this enabled the bureau indirectly to maintain Steele as an information source. Further, the memo elaborates that Ohr eventually transmitted to the FBI “all of his wife’s opposition research, paid for by the DNC and the Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS.”
The FISA court was not informed that Steele was paid $160,000 by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, through Fusion GPS and a law firm. Nor was mention made of his stated determination to prevent a Trump presidency.
While the FBI formally cut Steele off after the October 31 Mother Jones interview, the memo points out that he should have been terminated for an earlier round of media interviews in September 2016, including the one that resulted in Michael Isikoff’s Yahoo story. This evidently did not happen because Steele lied to the FBI about his contacts with journalists.
Last month, senior Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham, made a criminal referral of Steele to the Justice Department and FBI. They requested that he be investigated with an eye toward a felony false-statements prosecution for lying to the FBI about his communications with the media.
Finally, the memo notes that one FISA application (presumably the first one) mentions information about Page’s fellow Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos. As we’ve previously recounted, during a night of drinking in London in May 2016, Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat he had learned from sources with claimed Kremlin contacts that the Russians purported to have thousands of emails damaging to Hillary Clinton. After hacked DNC emails began to be published in July, Australian intelligence notified their American counterparts about Papadopoulos’s remarks in London.
The House memo states that this “triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Peter Strzok.” This has prompted a celebratory assertion by the New York Times that this “confirms” that actions taken by Papadopoulos “were a factor in the opening of the [Trump-Russia] investigation” — a storyline the Times started pushing after it became known that the dossier that drove the Trump-Russia narrative was partisan opposition research.
But there’s a difference between being a “factor” and an important factor. The formal opening of an investigation is just a ministerial step. There is no indication in the memo that the FBI and Justice Department took energetic investigative measures, such as seeking FISA warrants to monitor Papadopoulos. Indeed, the statement of the offense submitted to the court when Papadopoulos pled guilty in the Mueller investigation (to a single count of lying to the FBI) indicates that the FBI did not even interview Papadopoulos until January 27, 2017 — a week after Trump was sworn in as president and seven months after Strzok opened the investigation.
By contrast, as the Times reported on April 19, 2017, Carter Page’s trip to Moscow in July 2016 had been “a catalyst for the F.B.I. investigation into connections between Russia and President Trump’s campaign.” That trip was the focus of the Steele dossier reporting. It has now been confirmed that the dossier was the foundation for the FBI’s surveillance of Page — the linchpin of the Trump-Russia investigation — that began four months before Papadopoulos was interviewed and continued well after that point.
A final point should be made about continuing attempts to shape our views of the memo and what it portends. It is fatuous to claim, as critics of Committee chairman Devin Nunes and the memo do, that it makes war on our investigative agencies while attempting to discredit the Mueller investigation.
When Democrats have run the Congress, they have not hesitated to decry the FBI’s use of Patriot Act and surveillance power. They then refer to it — quite correctly — as their constitutional obligation to conduct oversight and ensure that these agencies created by Congress carry out their taxpayer-funded missions appropriately. The point is to ferret out missteps, remedy them, and hold officials accountable; it is not to undermine the FBI, which is regarded as the nation’s premier law-enforcement agency for good reason.
As for Special Counsel Mueller, his principal mission from Day One has been to conduct a counterintelligence investigation aimed at learning exactly what Russia did to meddle in our election so that we can respond and blunt future threats. That mission is not in any way discredited by the committee’s memo. To the extent the memo casts doubt on the Trump-Russia “collusion” narrative that the Steele dossier did so much to fabricate, it has long been a pipe-dream that any criminal prosecution would be generated by that story-line. Prosecution, in any event, is not Mueller’s main occupation, even if it remains a preoccupation for others.
On the other side of the aisle, the committee has not been well-served by comparisons of the narrow FISA abuse detailed in the memo to Watergate — the greatest governmental crisis in modern American history. The memo outlines serious derelictions. Yet we do not yet know whether they are more widespread than the case of Page’s surveillance; nor do we know what other information was presented to the FISA court over the months of surveillance and, critically, whether valuable intelligence about Russian operations against the United States was derived.
The memo is a valuable first step. It underscores the continuing need to assess how deeply the FBI and Justice Department were enmeshed in the politics of the 2016 election. But much more disclosure is necessary before we can render a conclusive judgment of how deep the problems run.
Would we know any of this if Hillary won the election?
That’s pretty funny!
According to the law, with each renewal, you have to establish probably cause. I would like to know what the probably cause was for the renewals.
Why wasn’t the Clinton campaign being investigated for collusion with the British? Wasn’t Ohr in effect acting as an agent of the British?
Can Carter Page bring damage charges against Clinton dems and Fusion?
Because...because...Trump!
Tells me they want to keep the phony "Spy" charge quiet....and so they went on and on until they caught him in a lie. Probably how many times did you pee on August 25th?
So clever they are.
Also they withheld the source to the FISA court. They were very vague and lied by commission.
Also, they used media articles to support the dossier’s “truth”, media articles WHICH were written after STEEL gave these so-called journalist the information. That’s right STEEL, the same one who was paid for the dossier. And the media still spins this is just okey dokey fine. Nothing here to see folks.
You can’t make up this shit if you tried.
*
The prob cause and crime was that Americans voted for the wrong candidate. That crime had to be punished.
Spin by McCarthy.
Mueller's charge was to investigate "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump."
Mueller is not a spook. He is a prosecutor. He did not hire a staff of spooks. He hired a staff of prosecutors. If he is supposedly running a counterintelligence operation as McCarthy claims, he certainly picked the wrong people for it.
Mueller's assignment is to find crimes involving the Trump campaign and to prosecute them. In reality, since there was no legitimate predicate for a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign, his assignment is to conduct a fishing expedition to see if he can turn up something to prosecute and to try to punish those who dared to work for Donald Trump, if necessary by trapping them in process crimes if he can.
Mueller's mission is indeed discredited, and not only because the justification for spying on the Trump campaign by the Obama Administration has proven to be contrived.
The appointment of the Special Counsel was prompted by illegal leaks by a fired James Comey. Mueller has obvious conflicts of interest that he has refused to acknowledge. His supervisor Rosenstein has obvious conflicts of interest that he has refused to acknowledge.
And all they have are charges of old criminal conduct by Manafort having nothing to do with the election, process crimes against Flynn and Papadopoulos created by the investigation itself, and specious claims of obstruction of justice against Trump.
This is a disgrace and a stain upon the Justice Department, the FBI and those defending this disgrace.
When Obama used the IRS to destroy the Tea Party everyone should have seen this coming
As an article from Conservative Treehouse pointed out yesterday, there needs to be more focus on the type of FISA warrant that was sought and issued. The Feds got the Type 1 warrant which enabled them to tap the phones of all of Page’s contacts and known associates and not just a lond tap on his phone.
The Clinton campaign paid the Russians to concoct fake evidence that Trump colluded with Russians.
This so called dossier sounds to me like originally it was a satirical piece submitted and rejected by some publication. Suggesting Trump was so petty that he would “get even” with the facility in Moscow where he and his wife were staying when given the same suite which Obama used. An incredulous composition .
I won’t repeat what was stated in that opus. But frankly Trump doesn’t strike me as that sort of guy and that would consider such action is retaliation by having two hookers urinate on a bed Obama/Clinton slept in where Trump probably would consider that as a total waste of money.
As a piece of so called “intelligence” was there any verification ? That means complaints by the facilities housekeeping staff and statements by the two alleged hookers. Yet this is what the swamp creatures are claiming is intelligence which publicized will endanger America.
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