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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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Inspector general’s report on Russia probe: key takeaways

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/inspector-generals-report-on-russia-probe-key-takeaways/

Inspector general’s report on Russia probe: key takeaways

We pored through the 434-page document and highlighted the most important revelations. Check back for updates.

The FBI did not use the Steele dossier to open Russia probe

A key accusation among Trump’s allies has been that the FBI predicated its investigation of Trump campaign officials Carter Page, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn on information the bureau received from British ex-spy Christopher Steele.

But Horowitz found that the Crossfire Hurricane team — the codename agents gave to the Russia inquiry — did not receive Steele’s election reporting materials until after the investigation had already been opened using information about Papadopoulos the team received from a foreign ally.

Lynch, Comey sat for IG interviews

The inspector general wasn’t lacking in materials. According to the report, Horowitz’s team got to examine more than 1 million documents and conducted 170 interviews with more than 100 witnesses.

Pretty much all the key players who were integral to the Russia probe agreed to meet with the investigators, including former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former FBI Director James Comey (in a Monday op-ed he called the president’s criticism “all lies”) and former deputy attorneys general Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein. The IG also interviewed Dana Boente, the current FBI general counsel who also has served as an acting attorney general and acting No. 2 at the Justice Department.

Steele also met with the IG investigators. Two witnesses — Glenn Simpson and former State Department official Jonathan Winer — turned down requests for voluntary interviews and the IG chose not to force the issue.

FBI’s receipt of Steele’s dossier ‘played a crucial role’ in seeking surveillance order, but no evidence political bias was a factor

The Crossfire Hurricane team initially was waived off of applying for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant for Carter Page by high-level Justice Department officials.

The officials said the team needed more evidence first that Page was an agent of a foreign power. But after receiving Steele’s report, which detailed alleged coordination between Page and the Kremlin in the summer of 2016, the team asked again and were allowed to move forward.

While the agents did not have corroborating information to support Steele’s reporting, Horowitz found, he also “did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the FBI’s decision to seek FISA authority on Carter Page.”

Peter Strzok, Lisa Page involved but not decision-makers

The IG review puts some distance between the big decisions at the center of the Russia probe and the two top FBI officials who have been castigated by Trump and his allies for exchanging politically biased text messages.

According to the Horowitz report, FBI attorney Lisa Page didn’t play a role in the bureau’s decision to open Crossfire Hurricane or the other four cases tied to George Papadopoulos, Carer Page, Michael Flynn or Paul Manafort. As for Peter Strzok, the top FBI agent was “directly involved” in all of those decisions but the report notes “he was not the sole, or even the highest-level, decision maker as to any of those matters.”

Instead, that job fell to Bill Priestap, the FBI’s counterintelligence division chief, whom the IG concluded used his “exercise of discretion in opening the investigation” and “was in compliance with Department and FBI policies. The IG “did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced his decision.”

Carter Page was only Trump official under FISA surveillance

The IG found no evidence that the Crossfire Hurricane team sought or obtained FISA warrants on any other subjects of the investigation besides Page.

“Although the team also was interested in seeking FISA surveillance targeting Papadopoulos, the FBI [Office of General Counsel] attorneys were not supportive,” Horowitz wrote. “FBI and [National Security Division] officials told us that the Crossfire Hurricane team ultimately did not seek FISA surveillance of Papadopoulos, and we are aware of no information indicating that the team requested or seriously considered FISA surveillance of Manafort or Flynn.”

Papadopoulos, a former unpaid Trump campaign adviser whose interactions with a suspected Russian agent are what ultimately led the FBI to open the Russia probe, has repeatedly claimed that the Crossfire Hurricane team sought and obtained a FISA warrant to surveil him. And CNN reported in 2017 that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was under FISA-authorized surveillance before and after the election.

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had his calls with the former Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak intercepted by the intelligence community, leading some to suspect he was under surveillance.

First Carter Page FISA contained ‘seven significant inaccuracies and omissions’

Horowitz found that the Crossfire Hurricane team omitted several important details from their applications for a FISA warrant on Page, “including information the FBI had obtained from another U.S. government agency detailing its prior relationship with Page.”

That information included the relevant fact that Page, Horowitz wrote, “had been approved as an ‘operational contact’ for the other agency from 2008 to 2013,” and that he had informed that agency about his previous interactions with “certain Russian intelligence officers.” An FBI lawyer apparently altered an email from the other government agency by inserting the words “not a source,” Horowitz found, leading a supervisory agent to sign off on the third warrant renewal for Page without disclosing his past relationship with the other agency.

The team also overstated Steele’s reliability, Horowitz said, as well as the reliability of one of Steele’s sources—who Steele told the team was a “boaster” and an “egoist” prone to “embellishment,” according to Horowitz.

Page’s statements to an FBI confidential human source in August 2016—in which he said he had never met or spoken with Manafort—were also omitted, Horowitz found, as were his denials about meeting with the Russian officials cited in Steele’s reporting.

Steele dropped as FBI source after Mother Jones article

The FBI dropped Steele as a confidential source after he admitted to the bureau in November 2016 that he’d been a source for a Mother Jones story published that Halloween. That article suggested the intelligence official was helping U.S. officials investigate whether Russians were trying to develop a secret relationship with Trump and develop him as an asset.

But that didn’t stop the FBI from continuing to lean on Steele — DOJ attorney Bruce Ohr met with the bureau 13 times to pass on information from the intelligence operative — even amid dissent from their counterparts at the CIA.

According to Horowitz’s report, Steele’s information “was a topic of significant discussion” between the FBI and other intelligence agencies at the end of 2016 as the federal government tried to size up Russia’s intentions during the presidential campaign. The CIA expressed concern about the FBI’s vetting of Steele’s materials and urged it to be left out of a comprehensive intelligence community report. An FBI intelligence section chief told the IG’s investigators that the CIA saw Steele as trafficking in “internet rumor.” But the FBI still included the materials.

In their attempts to assess Steele’s credibility, the IG reported that FBI officials traveled overseas in November and December 2016 to meet with Steele’s professional contacts and people who knew him and collected information “both positive and negative.” Those findings didn’t go into his source file.

Steele had prior relationship with Ivanka Trump

Steele told OIG investigators that the idea he had a predisposed bias against the Trump family was “ridiculous” because he had “visited a Trump family member at Trump Tower and ‘been friendly’ with [the family member] for some years. He described their relationship as ‘personal’ and said that he once gifted a family tartan from Scotland to the family member.”

POLITICO has confirmed reporting from ABC News that the Trump “family member” Steele was friendly with was Ivanka Trump, according to two people familiar with the relationship, and that the pair communicated on and off until 2015 after meeting at a dinner in London in 2007.

Steele was pursuing a potential business opportunity with the Trump Organization as part of his investigative work for his private company Orbis at the time, which included research on Russia and eastern Europe where Trump’s company was looking to expand. But the talks ultimately petered out.

Manafort was under investigation for alleged money laundering prior to Russia probe scrutiny

In January 2016, the FBI initiated a money laundering and tax evasion investigation of Paul Manafort related to his payments from the Ukrainian government, Horowitz found.

That was two months before he officially joined the Trump campaign — an indication that the bureau had its eye on Manafort and his foreign work far earlier than has been reported.

Months later, in August 2016, when the Crossfire Hurricane team began probing Manafort’s ties to Russia, the report found, “Manafort was the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation, supervised by the Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS) in the Department’s Criminal Division, concerning millions of dollars Manafort allegedly received from the government of Ukraine.”

The money laundering investigation was transferred to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office in May 2017, according to Horowitz, and the probe ultimately led to criminal charges and a 7.5-year prison sentence that Manafort is now serving.

Ohr committed ‘consequential errors in judgement’

Horowitz’s team had sharp words for Ohr, saying the senior DOJ lawyer who also has come under fire by Trump and conservative allies had “committed consequential errors in judgment” by keeping his bosses out of the loop about what he was doing in relaying information to the FBI and by making himself a witness in the entire investigation.

According to the IG report, Ohr met with McCabe in mid-October 2016 to tell the FBI deputy director what he’d heard from Steele and Simpson. After that came 13 meetings between late November 2016 and mid-May 2017 with the Crossfire Hurricane team, a time span that concluded just after Trump fired Comey but before the appointment of Mueller. Ohr also met with State Department officials about Steele’s election reporting in November 2016.

Ohr’s error came in having all of those contacts without notifying his own DOJ supervisors in the deputy attorney general’s office — the same people who were responsible for reviewing and approving the Carter Page FISA applications. In fact, Ohr’s bosses didn’t learn about his interactions with the FBI until Congress asked for information about it in late November 2017.

While there’s no DOJ policy blocking Ohr from his meetings with Steele, Simpson, the State Department and the FBI, he did have an obligation to tell his supervisors. Ohr was “clearly cognizant of his responsibility” but acknowledged to the IG that the prospect he’d be told to stop having those conversations “may have factored into his decision not to tell them about it.”

‘Shit just got real’: Texts show some FBI agents with pro-Trump bias

Trump has gone on obsessively about the Page-Strzok texts showing their concerns over him winning the White House. Monday’s IG report makes it clear that the FBI also had agents working with sources tied to the Russia probe who were excited about Trump’s victory.

The texts and instant messages were sent the day after Election Day 2016. A supervising agent volunteers to work on any special prosecutor probe into the Clinton Foundation and compares Trump’s win to “watching a Superbowl comeback.” Another FBI agent writes, “Trump!” A colleague replies, “Hahahah. Shit just got real.” And then they add in another message: “I saw a lot of scared MFers on…[my way to work] this morning. Start looking for new jobs fellas. Haha.”

The FBI had informants inside and associated with the Trump campaign—but they weren’t used in the Russia probe

In 2016, “the FBI had several other” confidential human sources [CHS] “with either a connection to candidate Trump or a role in the Trump campaign,” Horowitz found.

One of those sources gave the FBI information about Page and Manafort, but was never made aware of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and provided intelligence that was largely open-source, Horowitz wrote. Another was a member of the Trump campaign, but didn’t inform his handler about his role there until after he’d already left the campaign.

The FBI did not task that source as part of Crossfire Hurricane, either, Horowitz found, and was considered “hands off” by the Russia probe team because they did not want to collect “campaign or privileged information with regard to the presidential election,” Horowitz wrote.

“Although the Crossfire Hurricane team was aware of these CHSs during the 2016 presidential campaign, we were told that operational use of these CHSs would not have furthered the investigation, and so these CHSs were not tasked with any investigative activities,” the report says.

#Foreign #Politics #Probe #takeaways

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marymosley · 6 years ago

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Are Democrats Giving Trump An Excuse To Pardon Manafort?

Below is my column in The Hill newspaper on the effort in New York to change constitutional protections against double jeopardy to allow prosecutors to charge former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort with state offenses. The effort is to guarantee that Manafort goes to jail if President Donald Trump gives him a pardon. The sight of politicians campaigning on the pledge to jail Manafort raises serious concerns of this highly selective effort. Moreover, the effort to change New York constitutional protection to get Manafort could give Trump precisely the basis for a pardon that Democrats are preemptively trying to deter.

Here is the column:

As Paul Manafort awaits sentencing next month, his viable options seem to be dwindling down to a presidential pardon. While the sentencing memorandum of special counsel Robert Mueller has not been made public, there is little question that Manafort is looking at a likely terminal period of incarceration after his cooperating agreement was tossed out for allegedly withholding information. His lawyers insist that Manafort, who will soon turn 70, is in failing health and cannot do a long stretch. Judge Amy Berman Jackson is unlikely to be particularly sympathetic, much like the judge who handed down a lengthy sentence to an older defendant who objected, “Judge, I am too old to serve all of that time.” The judge responded dryly, “I understand, just do the best you can.”

The best that Manafort can do seems to be getting worse by the day. New York politicians and prosecutors have been pursuing state charges to blunt any possible presidential pardon of the onetime Trump campaign chairman. Various accounts describe state prosecutors, who previously stepped aside so that Mueller could investigate unimpeded, as laying the groundwork for new crimes that would avoid constitutional barriers but still send Manafort behind bars for the rest of his life. The effort to pursue Manafort is wildly popular in New York and widely celebrated in the media as clever “insurance policy” fashioned by Democratic Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

The public discussion of looking for state charges against Manafort as insurance against a pardon by President Trump is becoming increasingly troubling and untoward. State prosecutors have campaigned for office on the promise to find ways to guarantee incarceration for one person. To do so, they are willing to remove state constitutional protections for all New Yorkers. This is much like removing all of the life preservers from an ocean liner to guarantee that one single passenger does not survive a sinking.

As a vocal critic of Manafort, I am not very easily inspired to care about his welfare. Manafort is one of the most corrupt figures in Washington, and he richly deserves a long prison sentence. Yet, there is something too tailored, too personal about the efforts by prosecutors to guarantee that he spends much of the rest of his life behind bars. For more than a year, New York politicians have been pledging to voters to move aside constitutional protections to allow Manafort to be charged with state crimes that are based on the same underlying transactions or activities.

The problem could be the bar on double jeopardy, the guarantee that people are not punished twice for the same conduct. Such guarantees originated in ancient Rome and were made part of our Constitution under the Fifth Amendment unless, it now seems, you are Paul Manafort. While civil libertarians have long warned of the erosion of this guarantee, New York has been the gold standard on this with a more protective provision barring redundant or related state prosecutions after federal convictions.

Then Donald Trump became president. Manafort was found guilty on eight counts related to financial fraud by a federal jury in Virginia then pleaded guilty to separate charges in Washington. During this time, speculation has been rampant that Trump may pardon Manafort, particularly after a series of sympathetic tweets. As a result, New York legislators called for clearing away rights that might be used by Manafort to protect himself.

James actually campaigned for office on that issue. That is right, a state attorney general was elected by campaigning to remove constitutional protections from all citizens. James was not alone here. Former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, before being forced out of office over sexual assault allegations, pushed the legislature to change the constitution and his successor, Barbara Underwood, then picked up the popular liberal cause to thwart the president by reducing double jeopardy protections.

Suddenly the double jeopardy clause was considered a “loophole” being used, to quote Underwood, to “thwart the cause of justice, rather than advance it.” Underwood told the New York legislature that it was urgent to change the state constitution in order to blunt the impact of a “politically expedient pardon.” While it is difficult to prove selective prosecution, Manafort seems to be in a criminal class of his own. Not only are these public pledges to go after Manafort building a possible defense for him, they also may be building a case for a presidential pardon from Trump. Manafort remains a tough candidate for pardon given his extensive criminal conduct and millions of ill-gotten gains. However, if Democrats are campaigning on changing the law to get at Manafort, Trump could cry foul and use the selective effort as a reason to pardon or commute on the federal offenses.

Manafort must feel like this is the start of deer hunting season, and he is the only deer allowed to be shot. The problem is not just the selectivity of these efforts but the fact that the other deer seem to have immunity by popular demand. Take Michael Cohen, former Trump attorney who has become a key witness against the president. There have been no similar calls to find state charges against Cohen to guarantee a long sentence.

While Manafort sits in jail awaiting a potentially long prison sentence, Cohen conversely secured another delay in serving a ridiculously short prison sentence for fraud and other crimes that netted him millions. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York had opposed leniency for Cohen and said he was a liar who withheld evidence. Judge William Pauley III described his history as a “veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct” but sentenced Cohen to just three years in prison.

Afterward, more allegations surfaced involving Cohen selling access and ripping off both the Trump organization and its contractors. He allegedly paid a firm to rig two polls in favor of candidate Trump and to create a Twitter account called Women for Cohen, to promote himself as a “sex symbol.” Cohen reportedly was given $50,000 by the Trump organization for that work but then gave the business, Red Finch Solutions, only some $12,000 in cash inside a Walmart bag along with a boxing glove from a Brazilian mixed martial arts fighter. Cohen has since denied that account.

Nevertheless, Cohen has now found favor with many Democrats. Not only have people inexplicably given him hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to testify against Trump, but Democratic lawmakers also seem uninterested in what information he allegedly withheld from New York prosecutors or his other alleged criminal conduct. It is certainly true that Trump is more likely to pardon Hillary Clinton than Cohen at this point. However, that is the problem. The effort against Manafort is being driven by the prospect of clemency as opposed to the actual underlying crimes. Indeed, there is a debate about what crimes might be best brought to bypass constitutional challenges and cement the harshest sentences.

An alternative is to leave the constitutional protections alone. Manafort can be prosecuted for any evasion of state tax laws under New York law and existing precedent, but Vance and other prosecutors should show also equal vigor in pursuing any such crimes by Cohen. As for a possible pardon or commutation of Manafort, it still remains unclear whether the president would take such clearly unwarranted and inappropriate action.

What is clear, however, is that New York should not reduce protections for everyone in the state just to punish one man. Manafort is unlikely to finish even a modest sentence, given his declining physical condition. He is not worth undermining core due process and constitutional rights to add a few more years in prison as an insurance policy. There is more blind rage than blind justice behind the effort to amend the New York constitution.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. You can follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.

Are Democrats Giving Trump An Excuse To Pardon Manafort? published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

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