Live Free Or Die
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Possibly even worse, declassified footnotes in the Horowitz report revealed that the FBI had multiple indications that the dossier was contaminated with Russian disinformation. It turns out that Steele had close connections with five Russian oligarchs who tried to use him as an intermediary to connect with the FBI. Meanwhile, sources providing information for the dossier had connections with Russian intelligence, and the FBI thought Russian agents may have targeted Steele’s private intelligence company.29 So when you heard about dossier allegations from all the media mobsters, leaking FBI agents, and Trump-hating Democrats like Shifty Adam Schiff, there’s a good chance they were spreading Russian disinformation.
The report also confirmed the FBI could never verify any of the dossier’s insane accusations. Why? Because—as we noted all along—they were unverifiable. As the IG wrote, the “Crossfire Hurricane team was unable to corroborate any of the specific substantive allegations regarding Carter Page contained in Steele’s election reporting.”30 As we reported much earlier, the FBI put together a spreadsheet containing each of Steele’s allegations; it failed to confirm any of them. And that included the allegations it presented to the FISA court as proof that Page was a Russian asset. Pretty much the only thing the FBI ever managed to confirm, said the IG, was “publicly available information” such as dates or names. The dossier was a pack of lies.
The FBI never told any of this to the FISA court. It knowingly suppressed the damning facts about the reliability of this principal source and of Steele himself. The IG reported that in later FBI interviews, Steele couldn’t keep straight where he’d gotten all his information. His own primary source said Steele exaggerated or misstated claims. And when Bureau agents finally got around to talking to Steele’s former colleagues about the quality of his work, they were told repeatedly that Steele demonstrated “lack of self-awareness” and “poor judgment.”31 Yet instead of fessing up to the FISA court its discovery that its source and material were all a fraud, the FBI in application after application continued to present the Steele dossier as rock-solid.
Then there’s all the exculpatory information the FBI purposely left out of its application, facts that would have destroyed its case against Page. The FBI in the summer and fall of 2016 had sent “confidential human sources”—or what honest people call “spies”—to talk to Trump campaign members, including Page. In one conversation, Page told the FBI spy that he’d “literally never met” Paul Manafort. Page also denied ever having met two Russians who the dossier claimed were his collusion points of contact.32 Both these statements directly contradicted the dossier’s claims. But the FBI purposely didn’t tell the FISA court about these denials, despite a requirement to do so.
Worse, the FBI deliberately kept hidden from the court the crucial information that Page had actually been approved as an “operational contact” for the CIA from 2008 to 2013 and that he’d reported information to that agency about interactions he’d had with Russian intelligence officers. The man the FBI had accused of being “an agent of a foreign power” had actually worked with the CIA, serving the country he loves. The FBI didn’t just hide this crucial detail; it turned Page’s service against him, using his contact with the Russian officers as more “proof” that he was colluding. The IG reported that an FBI lawyer even went so far as to doctor an email from the CIA, to keep hidden from the court that Page had worked as a CIA source. Horowitz has referred that attorney, Kevin Clinesmith, for possible criminal prosecution.
Finally, Horowitz confirmed we were right that the FBI had been warned every which way that Steele was a political operator, out to take down Trump. Comey spun propaganda to the nation on this, too. In his interview on Fox, Baier asked Comey when he found out the dossier had been paid for by the Clinton rabble. Comey responded, “I still don’t know that for a fact. I’ve only seen it in the media.”33
Really, Comey? The IG report explains that Justice Department official Bruce Ohr—whose wife worked for Fusion GPS—went to FBI and DOJ officials with warnings that “Steele’s reporting was going to Clinton’s presidential campaign and others,” and that Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. president.”34 Steele also met in October 2016 with State Department officials, where he again rattled off his dossier conspiracy theories. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec told the FBI about her Steele meeting and pointed out that he had some information wrong—Steele had told her a conspiratorial ring of election saboteurs was being paid out of the Russian consulate in Miami, but there is no Russian consulate there.35
So the FBI was well aware even before it filed its application that Steele had credibility problems and was violating FBI rules by shopping his dossier to other Washington players.
One omission after another; one lie after another. Why lie about Page’s work for the CIA, the fact that he’d worked undercover and risked his life? Why not tell the court about the exculpatory statements Page made to an undercover FBI informant? Why not say up front that the Clinton campaign paid for this information? Why? Because the FBI knew that if they were truthful, if they were transparent, the court would have denied the application. The only way to view this is that the FBI engaged in a criminal conspiracy to commit fraud on the FISA court.
Not that the media mob will ever present it that way. When the devastating Horowitz judgment finally hit, the press largely ignored the parts about the FBI’s lies and distortion. It instead went into overdrive to distort two pieces of the report. First, it focused on Horowitz’s finding that the investigation had “sufficient predicate.” The media spun this to mean that the FBI was justified in launching a defcon investigation into a presidential campaign.
In fact, Horowitz went out of his way in the report to note several times that the “threshold” for starting an FBI probe is so “low” as to be nonexistent. The FBI has sweeping authority to probe pretty much anything. Horowitz also made a point of expressing his concern at finding that there were no existing rules requiring the FBI to get senior approval before launching a probe into a “sensitive” matter like a “major party presidential campaign.”36
The media’s second obsession was the following line in the report: “We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions to open” the investigation. “Report On F.B.I. Russia Inquiry Finds Serious Errors But Debunks Anti-Trump Plot,” screamed the New York Times headline. The report was a “triple rebuke to Trump’s conspiracy theories,” wrote Aaron Blake at the Washington Post.
This is the classic example of Fake News Media lying, lying, lying. Take apart that Horowitz statement. All he is saying is that his team didn’t find any smoking-gun email in the form of Comey saying the goal of his probe was to remove Trump.
But Horowitz found plenty of bias and included it in his findings. That included the text messages of disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok and his paramour, Lisa Page, a former FBI lawyer. The duo refers to Trump as a “loathsome human” and an “utter idiot.” In August 2016 a frantic Page texted the following to her lover: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Strzok responded: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”37 Strzok only a week later texted about the FBI’s need for an “insurance policy” in case Trump was elected. This was the man who was front and center on the anti-Trump probe, and his texts make more than clear that his “insurance policy” was an FBI investigation designed to undo the 2016 election.
In his congressional testimony, Horowitz himself directly contradicted the media claims of “no bias.” “There is such a range of conduct here that is inexplicable. And the answers we got were not satisfactory. That we are left trying to understand how could all these errors have occurred over a nine month period, among three teams, handpicked, in one of the highest profile if not the highest profile case in the FBI, going to the very top of the organization, involving a presidential campaign.” Horowitz als
o said this: “On the one hand, gross incompetence, negligence? On the other hand, intentionality? And where in between? We weren’t in a position, with the evidence we had, to make that conclusion [of intentionality], but I’m not ruling it out.”38
Attorney General William Barr put it more starkly in an NBC interview: “The core statement, in my opinion, by the IG, is that these irregularities, these misstatements, these omissions were not satisfactorily explained. And I think that leaves open the possibility to infer bad faith.” Barr summed up the broader findings this way: “Our nation was turned on its head for three years based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by a completely irresponsible press. I think there were gross abuses of FISA, and inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI.”39
REVENGE OF THE SWAMP CREATURES
How did this happen in our great country? How does one political party get away with feeding disinformation to our law enforcement and provoke a counterintelligence probe into a rival campaign? How does the FBI get away with turning its powerful tools on the man the United States citizenry elected as president? How do we end up with a special counsel who completely ignores FBI abuse and instead spends two years tyrannizing the Trump White House? How do we get stuck with a media horde that reports lie after lie, all to help the Democratic Party?
The answer: this is the swamp. The nation was put through hell for three years because a cabal of politicians, investigators, and media liars decided to put their own political agenda ahead of the country’s institutions and well-being. They ignored the rules, they trampled on the Constitution, and they threw over basic decency, all so that they could take out a president who had vowed to clean up that swamp.
Let’s be clear: there are specific individuals who are responsible for this epic scandal. The FBI is and remains the premier law enforcement agency in the world, and 99 percent of its agents are heroes. They are out protecting this country every day. The Russia witch hunt was instead about the 1 percent who abused their power for corrupt reasons.
At the top of that list is Mr. Super Patriot himself, Jim Comey. He spent his entire Washington career parading around as holier-than-thou. The guy even had the gall, after Trump fired him for incompetence, to write a book titled A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. We rely on individuals in powerful positions to guard the government against political dirty tricks like the Clinton dossier. Comey instead invited the bad guys in and put his FBI at their disposal.
Consider that word: “leadership.” After Comey was fired, he was the subject of two other Horowitz reports even before the inspector general released his one on FISA abuse. The first excoriated Comey for his handling of the Hillary Clinton server case. You remember the one? Where the FBI treated the Clinton campaign with kid gloves even after Clinton mishandled classified information, deleted subpoenaed emails, and acid-washed her hard drive with BleachBit to disappear whatever she was hiding. Instead of charging Clinton with a crime, Comey broke the chain of command, going around his superiors to call a press conference at which he spent fifteen minutes slamming her for being “extremely careless.”
That IG report found that Comey was no leader. It denounced him for being “insubordinate,” usurping Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s authority by doing that press conference.40 It rebuked him for using the media conference to make derogatory statements about a person the DOJ was declining to prosecute. The report was perfectly consistent with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo recommending Comey be fired, in which Rosenstein wrote, “[Comey] laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial. It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.”41
The second Horowitz report on the former FBI director, issued in August 2019, destroyed Comey’s infamous claims that he doesn’t leak or do “weasel moves.” Turns out that after Trump fired Comey, Mr. Super Patriot had swiped four government memos detailing his private conversations with the president and stashed them in his home safe. Comey leaked the memos to his private attorneys, including one containing classified information, and also had a buddy leak the contents of one to the New York Times. These documents were so sensitive that FBI agents showed up at the disgraced former director’s front door to retrieve them.
Horowitz found, “By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees—and the many thousands more former FBI employees—who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information.”42 The IG found Comey’s handling and dissemination of the memos violated FBI policies and his own employment agreement, and Horowitz referred Comey for federal prosecution for mishandling classified information. Only the DOJ declined to prosecute. Why? Because Comey made certain none of the memos were “marked” as classified when he was director; only after he was fired did the memos undergo a classification review. So Comey could claim that nothing was officially classified at the time he mishandled the information. How’s that for a weasel move?
Speaking of weasel moves, also consider this: Comey admitted the entire reason he leaked that memo information to the New York Times was to pressure the DOJ to appoint a special counsel to investigate Trump-Russia collusion. Thanks to all the Horowitz digging, however, we now know that by that time, Comey and his corrupt FBI cronies knew the collusion claim was a lie. They knew Clinton was behind the dossier, that Steele was a dirty political operator, that his own main source admitted the dossier was unconfirmed gossip, and that they hadn’t verified a single accusation. Yet Comey still schemed to appoint a special prosecutor, who spent two more years putting the country through hell. This one leak alone shows how political Comey was from the get-go. This was an FBI director out to get President Trump.
Or how about his underhanded ensnaring of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn? Only a few days after Trump was sworn into office, the FBI sent agents to interview the general about his transition-period conversations with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. They’d discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia and a UN resolution condemning Israel. The FBI concocted the outrageous theory that Flynn might have violated the Logan Act, a law that bars U.S. citizens from engaging with foreign governments without sign-off. No serious person prosecutes the Logan Act. Only two people have ever been indicted for violating the act, and the last one was in 1852.
Comey later bragged that he took advantage of the “chaos” of the new administration by sending agents to interview Flynn without following protocol. That FBI interview was something “I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more organized investigation, more organized administration, in the George W. Bush administration, for example, or the Obama administration,” Comey boasted in 2018. “In both of those administrations, there was a process. And so, if the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House itself to interview a senior official, you would work through the White House counsel and there would be discussions and approvals, and who would be there. And I thought, it’s early enough. Let’s just send a couple guys over.”43
The sick reality is that Comey didn’t need to ask Flynn about those conversations. The FBI already had the transcripts. The only reason to interview Flynn was to set him up for a perjury trap. This was confirmed by handwritten notes taken after a meeting consisting of Comey, McCabe, and FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap, in which the note taker—presumably Priestap—asked if the goal of the Flynn interrogation was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”44 And McCabe admitted that he lulled Flynn into thinking he didn’t need a lawyer present for the interview and purposely omitted the standard warning against lying to the FBI. They wanted Flynn “relaxed.”45 It later emerged that the FBI had decided to close its investigation of Flynn weeks before his interview, having found no derogatory infor
mation on him, but Strzok intervened, saying his superiors wanted it kept open.46
Flynn had conducted hundreds of discussions during the presidential transition, and his recollections of the Kislyak conversation didn’t match what was in the transcript. The FBI interviewing agents nonetheless said they saw “nothing that indicated to them that he knew he was lying.”47 And why would he intentionally lie? Flynn had headed the Defense Intelligence Agency and surely knew the FBI was monitoring Kislyak’s calls. Despite all this, Mueller went after Flynn for “lying,” driving him to the edge of bankruptcy and threatening to indict Flynn’s son on unrelated issues. Flynn fell on his sword for his family and pleaded guilty to lying.
This is how the FBI and a special prosecutor treated a thirty-three-year veteran who protected his country over many years in combat. They set him up, put the screws to him, and gloated over their “plea deal.” The case was drenched in malfeasance and could proceed only as long as the evidence of the government’s abuses stayed hidden. Once Attorney General Barr appointed prosecutor Jeff Jensen to review the case, and Jensen began producing that evidence, the case disintegrated. Despite the judge’s outrageous resistance, the Department of Justice then sought to drop the prosecution, admitting there was no legitimate reason for the FBI to have interviewed Flynn in the first place.