Free Republic

George Papadopoulos A junior member of the Trump foreign policy advisory team in 2016, George Papadopoulos was approached by FBI agents in Chicago, where he lived with his mother after the election while waiting for what he hoped would be an offer to join the new administration. The agents said they just wanted to talk to him about contacts he’d made with people in London during the campaign. He spoke to them without a lawyer or the benefit of notes, emails or a calendar to refresh his recollection — a decision he would later regret. One of the interviews was...

CNN reports that an FBI attorney tampered with documents related to the Carter Page application. How much does it matter? Is this the tip of a scandalous iceberg? Or is it a signal that Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s much anticipated report on investigative irregularities in the Trump-Russia probe will be much ado about nothing much? A low-ranking FBI lawyer altered a document that was somehow related to the Obama Justice Department’s application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for a national-security surveillance warrant. The application, approved by the FISC in October 2016, targeted former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page...

Former AAG Matthew Whitaker Discusses Upcoming IG Report on FISA Abuse and Trump Campaign Surveillance… full title ... Following leaked revelations that former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith manipulated evidence to attain a Title-1 surveillance warrant against U.S. person Carter Page to conduct political espionage against the Trump campaign, former AAG Matthew Whitaker discusses the IG investigation and upcoming IG report. Whitaker notes the bigger issues are how the FISA process generally has been abused and potentially long-term ramifications. It is also worth remembering it wasn’t just “wiretaps” that were gained, the FBI requested and received full Title-1 surveillance authority including:...

Hillary Clinton has a new theory for why former FBI Director James Comey re-opened an investigation into her emails just before the presidential election. “He was under pressure from Rudy Giuliani, others, both former and current FBI officials,” Clinton said in an interview with Charlie Rose on Monday. Since losing the election to Trump, Clinton has railed against Comey over his Oct. 28 decision to re-open the email probe. The decision was made after FBI agents discovered some of Clinton’s emails on a computer shared by her aide, Huma Abedin, and her husband, Anthony Weiner. Weiner was under investigation at...

The FBI lawyer who is under criminal investigation for allegedly falsifying a document related to the surveillance of a Trump campaign adviser expressed negative opinions of President Trump in messages to colleagues. Kevin Clinesmith, who once was part of special counsel Robert Mueller's team, has been identified as the attorney who could face a criminal charge as part of U.S. Attorney John Durham's expansive criminal investigation into the origins of the Russia inquiry, according to the New York Times. As part of the Justice Department watchdog's now-completed investigation into alleged surveillance abuses, Clinesmith was found to have altered an email...