"Special Counsel John Durham’s “Report on Matters Related to
Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns”
Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns”
trickled out yesterday afternoon, hitting journalist inboxes just after
3:00 p.m.
A quick read revealed the following key takeaways:
- There was no valid predicate for the investigation, and the FBI knew it.
From the report:
It is the Office's assessment that the FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia. Similarly, the FBI Inspection Division Report says that the investigators “repeatedly ignore[d] or explain[ed] away evidence contrary to the theory the Trump campaign... had conspired with Russia... It appeared... there was a pattern of assuming nefarious intent.” An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes. Unfortunately, it did not.
The entirety of the
evidence the FBI used to launch its investigation of the Trump campaign
is contained in what came to be known as “Paragraph Five,” because it
ended up in that spot in a FISA warrant application on Trump volunteer
Carter Page.
- “There’s nothing to this, but we have to run it to ground.”
As
soon as the FBI received Paragraph Five, Counterintelligence chief
Peter Strzok and a supervisory agent rushed to London, where they met
with an FBI legal attaché (UKALAT) and interviewed diplomats at the
Australian High Commission. In a taxi on the way to the interviews,
Strzok reportedly said, “There’s nothing to this, but we have to run it
to ground,” as the attaché later told the FBI’s inspection division.
One
of the Australian diplomats told the FBI team that “the Paragraph Five
information was written in an intentionally vague way because of what
Papadopoulos did and did not say,” and, because of their uncertainty
about what to make of it. The report says Downer told the FBI that
Papadopoulos “simply stated, ‘The Russians have information…’ He made no
mention of Clinton emails, dirt or any specific approach by the Russian
government to the Trump campaign team with an offer or suggestion of
providing assistance.”
- “It’s thin”; “There’s nothing to this.”
A
message exchange on August 11, 2016 between the attaché and the
supervisory agent shows the Americans were as skeptical as the British.
UKALAT-1: Dude, are we telling them [British Intelligence Service-I] everything we know, or is there more to this?
Supervisory Special Agent-1: That’s all we have.Supervisory Special Agent-I: not holding anything backUKALAT-1: Damn that’s thinSupervisory Special Agent-I: I knowSupervisory Special Agent-I: it sucks
- The Trump campaign investigation was premised on “raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated intelligence,” and U.S. intel agencies possessed no “actual evidence of collusion” when the probe began
According
to Durham, the senior FBI officials who ordered the probe did not look
at the Bureau’s intelligence databases, or consult its experienced
Russia analysts, who could have told them they had seen no information
about Donald Trump being involved with Russian leadership officials.
- Sensational stories published in the New York Times in February and March 2017 claiming Trump associates were in contact with Russian intelligence agents were false.
Declassified FBI documents from the period surrounding publication of two influential New York Times articles include Strzok’s annotated refutations of the Times
stories, which cited as sources “four unnamed current and former U.S.
intelligence officials.” Strzok wrote that there was no information
“indicating that at any time during the campaign anyone in the Trump
campaign had been in contact with Russian intelligence officials.”Durham’s report disputed the Times
accounts that saying US law enforcement and intelligence agencies
intercepted communications of Trump associates and campaign officials
showing repeated contacts with “senior Russian intelligence officials in
the year before the election”; that the intercepted communications had
been captured by the NSA; and that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort
had been heard on intercepted calls. The Times has repeatedly said it stands by those stories, including as recently as February of this year when former Times reporter Jeff Gerth wrote about Strzok’s rebuttal of that reporting in the Columbia Journalism Review.
- FBI Director James Comey pushed heavily for an investigation of Carter Page, starting in April 2016 when Page was a government witness in an espionage investigation of Russian diplomats in New York.
Getting
a bead on Page was “a top priority for the director,” one intelligence
agent said. The attorney who prepared the first of four FISA
applications on Page “recalled being constantly pressured to move
forward by FBI management.” The report cites Department of Justice
Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report
in stating that McCabe and Comey were agitating for lawyers to complete
the Page FISA. McCabe told interviewers that, “Comey repeatedly asked
him ‘Where is the FISA, where is the FISA? What’s the status… with the
Page FISA?”
The FISA was found by the IG to be deeply
flawed, riddled with false information and errors. Comey declined to be
interviewed by the Durham team.
- At the direction of the FBI, confidential human source Stefan Halper recorded lengthy conversations with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, in which each denied the campaign had any involvement with Russian officials.
These
tapes were in the possession of Crossfire Hurricane investigators, who
discounted their denials and ignored exculpatory information they
provided in seeking FISA warrants. From the report:
The FBI chose
to adopt an interpretation of Papadopoulos's denials of any knowledge of
the Trump campaign's involvement with the Russians in connection with
the DNC computer intrusion and subsequent publication of certain DNC
emails as being “weird,” “rote,” “canned,” and “rehearsed.”
The
Bureau ignored assertions by Papadopoulos that assistance from the
Russians would be “illegal,” and that “espionage is treason.” Agents
were so determined to elicit incriminating comments from Papadopoulos
that they pressed one of his friends into making 23 separate recordings
of him, challenging him with “approximately 200 prompts or baited
statements which elicited approximately 174 clearly exculpatory
statements.” None of this information ever reached either the FISA court
or the news media.
- Durham was highly critical of the FBI’s “startling and inexplicable failure” to investigate the so-called “Clinton Intelligence Plan.”
In late July,
2016, U.S. intelligence agencies “obtained insight into Russian
intelligence analysis” alleging Hillary Clinton approved a campaign plan
to stir up a scandal against Trump, by “tying him to Putin and the
Russians' hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”
Then-CIA
Director John Brennan thought the information was important enough to
brief the President, Vice President, Attorney General, the Director of
National Intelligence, the FBI director and other senior officials. On
September 7, 2016, U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an
investigative referral to Comey and Peter Strzok, but the two have said
they don’t recall hearing about it. Numerous others at FBI were informed
about it, the report said.
The report concludes the FBI:
Failed to act on what should have been—when combined with other incontrovertible facts—a clear warning sign that the FBI might then be the target of an effort to manipulate or influence the law enforcement process for political purposes during the 2016 presidential election.
The
report notes in detail how false information intended to damage Trump –
the Steele Dossier and the Alfa Bank claims – was provided to the FBI
by people tied to the Clinton campaign. Had the FBI investigated what
Durham termed the “Clinton intelligence plan” as it pursued its
“Crossfire Hurricane” probe, it “would have increased the likelihood of
alternative analytical hypotheses and reduced the risk of reputational
damage both to the targets of the investigation as well as, ultimately,
to the FBI.”
Durham added that if the FBI looked into the
“Intelligence Plan,” it might at least have cast a critical eye on the
phony evidence it was gathering in Crossfire Hurricane, and/or
questioned whether it was “part of a political effort to smear a
political opponent and to use the resources of the federal government's
law enforcement and intelligence agencies in support of a political
objective.”
ZeroHedge
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