Trump and the FBI (1 Viewer)

"What matters is our actions. Our personal views, regardless of what they are, are irrelevant. What matters is what we do."

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SaintsInDome2006 said:

The insurance policy explained.

(It would be nice if the House GOP would spring for searchable text, but nm).

Snip1

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The Z Machine said:

@SaintsInDome2006, tell me why these passages are significant, please.

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SaintsInDome2006 said:

Assuming Trumpite claims are themselves significant, they have been claiming that Ohr’s and Page’s testimony would confirm their arguments about investigations and investigators tilted towards Hillary and against Trump. It appears that quite the opposite emerged.

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The Z Machine said:

I don't really recall these "counter claims" making any sense at the time.  It seems highly implausible that the FBI was in the tank for Hillary and trying to set up Trump.  I've met FBI agents, and there's simply no way they would conspire to play politics like that.

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SaintsInDome2006 said:

I agree completely. Just an observation but glancing at those transcripts Page and Ohr come through really well.

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Mr. Bojangles said:

Sure they do....

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John Blutarsky said:

Saints...you write many things here and always with no snark like so many do here. However, you defending Strzok is something I didn’t expect. 

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sho nuff said:

Crickets as usual.

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SaintsInDome2006 said:

Some more snips from Ohr’s testimony.

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SaintsInDome2006 said:

@John Blutarsky seriously I don’t mean any offense by my prior post. Here’s Ohr’s testimony in full. I’ve put this offer out before to several people, I’m always interested in detail. And at any rate maybe you’ll find it interesting yourself. My feeling of sense is that if you look at it yourself you will reach different conclusions than whatever it is you’ve been inclined to so far.

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sho nuff said:

As expected....crickets again.  

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SaintsInDome2006 said:

@John Blutarsky seriously I don’t mean any offense by my prior post. Here’s Ohr’s testimony in full. I’ve put this offer out before to several people, I’m always interested in detail. And at any rate maybe you’ll find it interesting yourself. My feeling of sense is that if you look at it yourself you will reach different conclusions than whatever it is you’ve been inclined to so far.

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John Blutarsky said:

What are you trying to get at.....again....all my point is people in the FBI had contact with Steele and memos prior to the investigation. Why can’t you accept that?

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John Blutarsky said:

What are you trying to get at.....again....all my point is people in the FBI had contact with Steele and memos prior to the investigation. Why can’t you accept that?

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SaintsInDome2006 said:

The DOJ has declined to prosecute FBI Director Jim Comey.

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SaintsInDome2006 said:

Judicial Watch magically obtains Bruce Ohr’s 302 interview form.

- Apparently Ohr was in touch with the FBI about his contacts with Steele every step of the way.

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SaintsInDome2006 said:

McCabe case is still under investigation.

- 2 prosecutors have quit, a key witness went very badly for the DOJ, and the grand jury expired apparently without an indictment.

- The investigation is currently with DAG Rosen, who iirc has no criminal trial or IC experience.

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I confess that this story shocks me.

The New York Times reported yesterday that “Federal prosecutors in Washington appear to be in the final stages of deciding whether to seek an indictment of Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director and a frequent target of President Trump, on charges of lying to federal agents.” Reporter Adam Goldman declares that,

In two meetings last week, Mr. McCabe’s lawyers met with the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, who is expected to be involved in the decision about whether to prosecute, and for more than an hour with the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, Jessie K. Liu, according to a person familiar with the meetings. The person would not detail the discussions, but defense lawyers typically meet with top law enforcement officials to try to persuade them not to indict their client if they failed to get line prosecutors to drop the case.

Let me translate this paragraph for you: Such meetings generally take place when indictment is imminent; they happen when the government plans to bring charges. You should thus expect charges against McCabe to be forthcoming any day. And if such charges don’t happen, that doesn’t mean they weren’t planned but, rather, that some extrinsic event has intervened.

Why is that shocking? Because as best as I can tell, the facts available on the public record simply don’t support such charges. The only visible factor militating in favor of the Justice Department charging McCabe, in fact, is that the department has been on the receiving end of a sustained campaign by President Trump demanding McCabe’s scalp.

To be sure, the inspector general’s report that prompted McCabe’s firing paints a deeply troubling portrait of McCabe’s conduct. It describes, in brief, how McCabe authorized an October 2016 disclosure on background to the Wall Street Journal and then misrepresented his role in the story on several occasions—including to the inspector general. I have no reason to disbelieve the inspector general’s account of this episode and no interest in defending McCabe’s alleged conduct. While McCabe has disputed the findings, he has not—at least not as of yet—presented a plausible alternative narrative that accounts for the facts the inspector general recounts. My point here is thus not to suggest that McCabe did nothing wrong.

But criminal charges? At least based on what’s in the inspector general’s report, this is very far from a criminal case. Criminal dispositions on false statements matters in internal investigations are exceptionally rare. Absent some gross aggravating factor, I struggle to think of any other examples. Workplace false statements are normally handled through internal disciplinary means, not criminal charges. There are countless public cases of gross misconduct and lies about that misconduct that are routinely declined as criminal matters. 

...

The list could go on and on and on, but you get the point. Indeed, the extraordinary thing about McCabe’s case compared to these ones is that the Justice Department appears to have engineered McCabe’s firing, ostensibly in response to the inspector general’s finding of a lack of candor, mere hours before his retirement eligibility. It’s true that the FBI routinely treats lack of candor as a fireable offense—but it remains unexplained why the Justice Department seemingly raced the clock in order to push McCabe out rather than proceed at the usual pace and note that he would have been subject to disciplinary proceedings if he had not retired. That alone is a vindictive level of harshness relative to the norm. Criminal prosecution is several standard deviations from the norm.

Perhaps one might argue that McCabe is differently situated from these people—a high-ranking FBI official whose example might plausibly serve as a deterrent to misconduct by others. But the reality is quite the opposite. The prosecution of McCabe would, indeed, send a message, but it would send a very different message from one of even-handed application of the rules to those high up on the totem pole.

Because, in fact, there are some substantially mitigating factors in McCabe’s case, even assuming that the facts are every bit as bad as the inspector general alleges. For one thing, the events took place during  a chaotic time at the bureau when the FBI was handling politically explosive investigations involving both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Even if one doesn’t believe, as McCabe contends, that he was merely confused when he made the false statements, the intense pressure of the situation is mitigating. Moreover, McCabe did correct the record following his misstatements to the inspector general; a few days after the interview in question, he called up investigators and said he had been reflecting on his statement and believed he had erred. ...

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Upon completing our investigation, pursuant to Section 4(d) of the Inspector General Act of 1978, the OIG provided a copy of its factual findings to the Department for a prosecutorial decision regarding Comey's conduct. See 5 U.S.C.A. App. 3 § 4(d) (2016). After reviewing the matter, the Department declined prosecution. Thereafter, we prepared this report to consider whether Comey’s actions violated Department or FBI policy, or the terms of Comey’s FBI Employment Agreement. As described in this report, we conclude that Comey’s retention, handling, and dissemination of certain Memos violated Department and FBI policies, and his FBI Employment Agreement.

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sho nuff said:

So, pretty much the definition of an actual nothing burger?

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sho nuff said:

So, pretty much the definition of an actual nothing burger?

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SaintsInDome2006 said:

What That Comey Email Report Really Says

- By Ben Wittes.

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[scooter] said:

Excellent analysis.

Basically, Horowitz is arguing that an illegal order should be treated like any other "sensitive investigative information", and therefore should not be disclosed publicly. Which seems like a pretty dangerous precedent and certainly not something that our pro-transparency/anti-corruption/anti-deep-state friends should be happy about.

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More generally, the report does not discuss whether presidential efforts to intervene in investigations, in violation of department rules about proper communication channels and chain of command, constitute the official business of the FBI director. The report does, however, lay out abundant evidence that such efforts are not normal. It quotes former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker stating that any one-on-one meetings are “quite outside the norm of interactions between the FBI Director and a President of the United States.” It describes Baker and Comey’s repeated efforts to address Trump’s direct communications: After Trump asked Comey to let the Flynn investigation go, the report quotes Comey as saying he “took the opportunity to implore the Attorney General to prevent any future direct communication between the President and me. I told the AG that what had just happened—him being asked to leave while the FBI Director, who reports to the AG, remained behind—was inappropriate and should never happen.”

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Comey may well be guilty of retaining memos that constitute official records. But to make that case, the inspector general would first have to establish that it is part of the FBI director’s official duties to let the president interfere in ongoing investigations. Needless to say, it has not done that.

Instead, the report provides compelling proof that Comey is a hypocrite and a grand-stander, while dodging the critical question of what the Justice Department can do in the face of the president’s ongoing efforts to dismantle the protections on its investigative integrity.

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After Trump called Comey directly about an intelligence investigation on March 9, 2017, Comey called then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions immediately, “to keep the Attorney General in the chain of command between [Comey] and the President.” The last memo records Comey reviewing again the proper channels for the president to intervene in investigations; the report’s discussion of it notes that Comey’s chief of staff shared the details in real time with the proper chain of command.

Is this what constitutes official business? This is what the inspect general’s report would have you believe: that the president asking Comey to do things that break the FBI’s rules is part of the FBI director’s job—and hence, Comey is at fault for airing that official business to his associates and ultimately the press. The report treats a memo recording the president demanding that he “‘lift the cloud’ created by the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election” as official business, implying that Comey should have done what the president asked of him.

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