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.
According to some folks, a couple of agents, no longer feeling comfortable and free to criticize leaders over coffee or lunch, with other agents, known to them for many years, in case they’d be “reported to others in DC” and they’re jobs would no longer be secure at the Bureau when they were looking forward to life after retirement. Numerous agents who had worked for the FBI since college graduation and had been thinking of other careers after 25 years and still young enough to spend another 25 years working in security elsewhere!
This one story may seem trivial to numerous folks here, especially those who are quite a while in their retirement but I’ll bet there are guys and gals with young families who seem to feel trapped with not many choices after years working at a very honorable job investigating ban or securities fraud, when they never committed anything but honesty and integrity in their work or private life, to all of a sudden, having a new administration appoint crooks, liars and thieves to the top of their food chain.
A number of agents stepped forward and blew the whistle on their bosses, yet even then these people are in relative obscurity for legitimate reasons - threats and real physical harm to themselves but even their spouses, kids, etc.
A few might sign up for that when they are single but many simply will not signup for that option when they haves wives, husbands and children are involved.
I might not like it and like you, have stated “if anyone had even one ounce of integrity, they’d toss their job security and ‘comfy retirement,’ regardless of their families!” without a thought of life for “walking in those same shoes.”
Wray has turned out to be a bad pick by President Trump.
Any well meaning individuals don’t matter no matter how courageous they might be. It didn’t work for Von Stauffenberg and it won’t work here. This is why we have to dissolve these agencies and turn over all domestic affairs that these agencies currently handle over to the states. Depending on the state, these agencies come under the purview of the state AG or governor. if these agencies act unprofessionally or illegally, the governor or AG is responsible. Right now it’s the president and we all know that his power here to reform these agencies is a joke.
What is left of these agencies (foreign affairs) needs to be restructured and some effective means of checking their power needs to be implemented. Whether that means judicial oversight and/or legislative oversight with real teeth. They also need to scrupulously follow the constitution and if they fail, agents need to be personally responsible.
In the mean time, the best the public can do now is continue to raise the issue, refuse to give these agencies evidence and if serving on a federal jury, opt for jury nullification (as a means of civil disobedience) when evidence is presented by these agencies.
No more band-aids. Believe me if the public stop supporting these agencies and their people, they will be forced to reform.
When speaking with Dan Coats, he told me he “ran on term limits (2), so was through serving. What he didn’t tell me, he wasn’t leaving DC and probably working for a lobbyist on things against America!I even think when Dan Coats served, he was on this same Senate committee!
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It's a septic tank.
Why would the new “top dog” have to come from Gov’t?
Wray is a multi millionaire. He certainly didn’t need the money. He made his money by connections and they, in turn, pushed for him. Comey, Mule and so many others should never had gotten their political hack jobs. There are probably hundreds of qualified people who could run the FBI and would do a good job. Of those, there are only a few the Swamp will take.
After the occupant of the head shed is gone and those two layers of cancer, make the rest of the FBI walk across broken glass and hot coals to prove they want to keep their jobs. /#irrigated taxpayer.
That would virtually empty the District of Corrruption: an excellent idea.
I think the greatest weakness of the Trump administration has been the dearth of cabinet and top white house aides who actually support the agenda he ran on. There have been as many or more under-miners as true supporters of the president’s efforts.
Are you talking about Lindsey Graham, or some other committee chairmen? Lindsey’s a regular Jekyll and Hyde for much of this year.
And Paul Ryan was supposed to become a “full time dad” when he left the House. Looks like he’s still hanging around DC and the Fox headquarters. Maybe he moved his family to DC.
Wray can only delay for so long. At some point the dam will burst and he will have to decide if he wants to go down with the traitors by trying to protect them, or if he wants to be part of the reconstruction of the FBI.
Have to go deeper than that. What the President needs to do is, through a back channel, find some old FBI agent that has no problem telling anyone how the cow eats the cabbage. One of the ones that’s been in trouble here and there, never got promoted, never wanted to get promoted, liked being on the street, avoided at all costs any assignment in DC and being around the McCabes/Strzok’s/Priestap’s, all the bosses hate him because they know their sh*t and get the job done but they don’t necessarily do in proper FBI, hoity toity fashion. An agent that is more rough, veteran street cop, than they are polished agent in Brooks Brothers.
That’s the person that knows everything and everybody. They got friends all over the place and they’re fed all the gossip and know about all the dirty sh*t these people have done.
Why? Because going 2 layers deep isn’t enough. You need the knuckledragger to start naming the names of everyone that was in the Comey/McCabe/Strzok/Priestap/Page/Baker/Lynch/Holder clique, down to the most junior person. And then lay waste to all of them. For those that can’t be fired, assignments in the worst offices, investigating whatever. Make life hell for them.
There are whole offices filled with these people pledged their loyalty to these criminals in the hopes of getting pulled up for all they did for the crown.
It is approaching the point at which we really must face reality and realize the “Civil War” we have all known was coming is not in the future but in the past. We lost. We didn’t even realize it.
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