Posted on 07/30/2019 6:56:05 AM PDT by yesthatjallen
The FBI is going to court to fight the public release of a small number of documents the State Department sent to agents from Christopher Steele, the British intelligence operative and Hillary Clinton-paid political muckraker, during the 2016 election.
Normally, such Freedom of Information Act cases don’t merit public attention. This one does.
To hear the FBI tell it, the release of former Deputy Assistant Secretary Kathleen Kavalec’s documents is tantamount to giving up the keys to President Trump’s nuclear briefcase, aiding the enemy or assisting terrorists.
“We know that terrorist organizations and other hostile or foreign intelligence groups have the capacity and ability to gather information from myriad sources, analyze it and deduce means and methods from disparate details to defeat the U.S. government’s collection efforts,” an FBI assistant section chief swore in an affidavit supporting the request to keep the documents secret.
The FBI can’t afford to “jeopardize the fragile relationships that exist between the United States and certain foreign governments,” the FBI official declared in another dramatic argument against the conservative group Citizens United’s request to release the memos.
And if that wasn’t enough, the bureau actually claimed that “FBI special agents have privacy interests from unnecessary, unofficial questioning as to the conduct of investigations and other FBI business.”
In other words, agents don’t want to have to answer to the public, which pays their salary, when questions arise about the investigative work, as has happened in the Russia case.
The FBI’s July 10 court filing speaks volumes about Director Christopher Wray’s efforts to thwart the public understanding of what really happened in the FBI’s now-debunked Russia collusion probe.
Steele’s contacts at State can’t possibly be equated to the nation’s most sensitive secrets. The same research he provided to State and FBI in fall 2016 was being provided to Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, and to the media.
In fact, Steele was fired from the FBI on Nov. 1, 2016, for leaking information. Any assumption of secrecy, privacy or classification is ludicrous. And a post-firing FBI analysis found most of Steele’s dossier was either wrong, could not be corroborated, or simply was made up of public source internet information. In other words, it was garbage intelligence.
On its face, the FBI’s behavior in the Citizens United case isn’t about protecting national security secrets. It’s about protecting the bureau’s reputation from revelations its agents knew derogatory information about Steele and his work before they used his dossier to support a surveillance warrant targeting the Trump campaign and failed to disclose that information to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
And that makes this court fight a waste of taxpayer dollars an unnecessary breach of public trust.
“Only through our litigation will the American people discover what the political operatives inside the Obama State Department and FBI were doing in 2016 with the fake Steele dossier before the FISA court," said David N. Bossie, the president of Citizens United.
To better illustrate the folly of the FBI’s fight, let’s examine one document the bureau is fighting to keep secret in its entirety.
It’s a five-page memo that Kavalec downloaded from Steele from an internet storage site after meeting with him on Oct. 11, 2016. She sent it to then-FBI section chief Steven Laycock, now an assistant director, two days later.
The document, according to my sources who have seen it, lays out a theory that Steele and some liberals spread late in the 2016 campaign that unusual computer pings between a Trump Tower server and Alfa Bank in Russia might be a secret communication channel by which Trump and Vladimir Putin were hijacking the election.
The theory has been written about in the media. Kavalec downloaded the file from Steele via a commercial internet download service and transmitted it to Laycock on non-classified email.
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who reviewed the document recently, wrote Attorney General William Barr last week saying the memo was “based on open source media reporting” and that the FBI’s claim that revealing it would harm sources and methods is “completely unfounded.”
In other words, it’s not the stuff intelligence laws were designed to protect.
Furthermore, the FBI investigated the theory and debunked it. Even the tight-lipped special counsel Robert Mueller went out of his way during testimony last week to say the Alfa Bank theory “is not true.”
So if Mueller could talk about it and the information was transmitted in a non-classified manner, why would the FBI go to such lengths to fight its release?
My sources say it’s because the State Department included notations on Steele’s five pages of research strongly calling into question his Alfa Bank theories before sending it to the FBI. In other words, they challenged the veracity and quality of Steele’s intelligence.
Under the FBI’s human source rules, a U.S. government’s negative assessment of an informer’s information would constitute “derogatory information” that would have to be disclosed to the FISC if Steele’s work was being used to support a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant.
Eight days after Kavalec sent Laycock her annotated version of Steele’s Alfa Bank research, the FBI submitted to the FISC an application that won the agency permission to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The bureau did not include State’s assessment. Instead, agents declared they possessed no derogatory information about Steele.
Such shenanigans happened on the watch of fired FBI Director James Comey, whose band of merry agents included supervisors Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe, both since fired for misconduct.
Wray took over the FBI long after such misdeeds occurred. But for some reason, his team has fought relentlessly to keep information secret from Congress and the public about Team Comey’s Russia case.
The House Intelligence Committee had to threaten it would issue a subpoena and go to court in summer 2018 before Wray gave up information about the bureau’s mistakes in the Russia probe. The Senate Judiciary Committee has not received a response to at least six letters it sent requesting FBI information in the Russia case dating to 2017.
Likewise, the FBI allowed text messages — some embarrassing — between Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page to be destroyed during the probe, blaming a software glitch. The Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general was able to recover some of those texts after an extensive effort.
And when Kavalec’s documents were discovered recently, the FBI initially redacted the name of Laycock as recipient of the Steele information. It eventually released Laycock’s name and acknowledged it was wrong to hide his identity.
“The FBI mistakenly asserted Exemptions 6 and 7C to redact the name of the FBI executive,” the bureau sheepishly said in a footnote to its most recent court filing.
After Barr said he believed the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign, Wray questioned his boss’s assessment in public. “It’s not the term I would use,” Wray told Congress.
When the government gets stuff wrong, as it did in the Russia case on Comey's watch, transparency is the best panacea for restoring public trust.
Claiming FBI agents have a privacy right to avoid facing hard questions, portraying public source documents as national secrets and doing the Muhammad Ali “rope-a-dope” dance to thwart disclosure is not an acceptable alternative.
It’s a lesson Chris Wray should learn, quickly.
Well, at least Wray is ‘transparent’. It was obvious during his first testimony before a congressional committee that his number one, or only priority, was to preserve the reputation of the FBI by covering up any evidence of past wrongdoing.
He has to go if there is any possibility of getting a successor confirmed at this point.
That means Chris Wray is committing a crime by obstructing justice and yet he remains the head of the FBI. What’s Trump waiting for?
Coats is gone and Wray hasn’t much longer either.
Not surprised, if true - do we know this as fact?
Why are we surprised when these agencies refuse to turn over documents? Why do we have these federal police state agencies anyways?
There are no real external controls over their power. If there are any effective check on their power isn’t that a recipe for disaster?
As long as these agencies continue to operate in secrecy, and as long as the public cannot really challenge their power, three things will happen or have already happened.
1. The agencies go rogue and powerful individuals in the agency operate them like a fiefdom. Information is power. Just look at the FBI’s coup attempt.
2. Foreign actors will use their influence to exert influence and eventual control over the agency. China and BLM.
3. Deep state actors will operate much like foreign actors in exerting influence and control. Money laundering banks and the DEA?
If these investigatory agencies were sent back to the states, the public would exert much more control and it would be more difficult for foreign actors to exert their influence because it would be much more evident and the corruption would be easier to detect at the state level. federal agencies operate in the dark.
Fire Chris Wray and the next 2 layers of his staff.
Needs repeating relentlessly !!
Obstruction of justice.
FBI use to have a wonderful reputation.
Today when i hear FBI, i think corrupt horse shit.
A pity what it’s been allowed to become.
Thanks for the links!
“a lawyer who LIES should be disbarred if not
imprisoned.
one who obstructs justice against sedition and treason,
should hang.”
AND...Rapists should be ‘given’ penisectomys !!
After Barr said he believed the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign, Wray questioned his boss’s assessment in public. “It’s not the term I would use,” Wray told Congress.
When the government gets stuff wrong, as it did in the Russia case on Comey’s watch, transparency is the best panacea for restoring public trust.
Claiming FBI agents have a privacy right to avoid facing hard questions, portraying public source documents as national secrets and doing the Muhammad Ali “rope-a-dope” dance to thwart disclosure is not an acceptable alternative.
It’s a lesson Chris Wray should learn, quickly.
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keep ICE, disband the FBI
Catch 22. Never trust an officer above the rank of Major. (My last rank on AD, I know.)
I hope you're right. Just don't know how the Republican senators would react, and if they'd approve a successor in a timely manner.
“There are good men still left at the Bureau”
Nope. They didn’t stand up to the corruption. They were like all the others that went along to get along. They were numerous and populated Nazi, Communist parties.
The police sate agencies create a culture that is primarily concerned with self preservation and the protection of their people. That’s why these agencies need to be mostly dissolved and individual states need to take over the domestic functions.
I notice FBI still can’t tell us why 600 people were shot in Vegas.
Christopher Wray is withholding the documents on the pretext that they expose sources and methods. He is entirely justified in his line of thinking because the documents definitely expose sources and methods that may have serious negative consequences.
The documents expose well established CIA regime change procedures by which the CIA takes down foreign governments and/or government officials via the manufacturing of false stories and narratives and planting them with compliant or complicit media sources to frame the targets and inflame public opinion against the target. This agitation it further flamed by “ grass roots” activist community organizers working boots on the ground operations to mobilize the general population and destabilize the targets, setting them up for the ultimate take down
The CIA is not supposed to be operating in the borders of the US or against American citizens so Brennan had to subcontract that part of the operation to FBI counter intelligence people who can work in the US
So the while documents certainly do not expose serious intelligence gather methods or actual secret agents engaged in legit intelligence gathering, they 100 % expose how the CIA manufactures false intelligence to falsely frame targeted people, political organization and governments and how they disseminate and employ that fake intelligence to shape public opinion to destabilize their targets and how they use surrogate boots on the ground assets to mobilize the general population and ultimately effect regime change
‘Fire Chris Wray and the next 2 layers of his staff.”
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Wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment...the only problem will be who does Trump install as successor to Wray?
Christie is a toady who has bad judgement and blows with the prevailing wind...
Gowdy talks tough but was totally ineffective with Benghazi...
Barr is already in a good spot at DOJ...
Rudy has good TV presence but is getting a bit long in the tooth...
We need someone who can crack heads and clean out the latrine...
Louie Gohmert would fit the bill!
FBI engaged in an attempted coup d’etat against our government. Wray has yet to make a single arrest. He is a disgrace.
What a wimp we have as FBI Director. Was he emasculated on the way into Trump's administration?
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