Attorney General Barr had plenty to say about misconduct at the FBI. What they didn’t do, what they did (and shouldn’t), and what they should have done. Here are the highlights from a recent interview with the Epoch Times
The FBI isn’t clean:
1. Don’t expect Attorney Durham’s findings to be announced before late spring or summer 2020.
2. The FBI did spy on the Trump campaign. That is what electronic surveillance is.
3. Regarding the FBI’s actions in surveilling the Trump campaign associates. It was a travesty. There were many abuses.
4. From day one the FBI investigation generated exculpatory information, information favorable to the defendant in a criminal trial that exonerates or tends to exonerate the defendant of guilt. It generated nothing supporting Russia collusion.
5. It is a big deal to use the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence resources to investigate the opposing political party. I cannot think of another recent incident in which this happened.
From the start
6. Even at the start, the FBI’s investigation into Trump associates was flimsy from the start and based on the idea Trump aid George Papadopoulos expressed he may have had pre-knowledge of DNC computer hack however it was actually just an offhand barroom comment the young campaign aid described as a suggestion of a suggestion, a vague allusion to the fact the Russians may have had something the can dump. But by that time, May 2016 there was already rampant speculation online and in political circles that the Russians had hacked Hillary Clinton’s email server in 2014 and that they might surface. So the idea that Papadopoulos’ comment might have shown pre-knowledge of the DNC hack and a potential Russian information dump is a big stretch.
7. It was wrong for the FBI to assume the Trump campaign was part of a plot it should have gone to the campaign and discussed the suspicion.
Expected normal
8. The normal thing to do would be to tell the campaign that there could be attempted foreign interference. There is no legitimate explanation for why the FBI did not do this. The FBI explanation for this is that they only do defensive briefings if there is no chance of tipping someone off. This is not true, is not plausible and does not hold water because our intelligence officials and president Barack Obama repeatedly contacted the Russians, the guilty party, to tell them to cut it out.
9. If the purpose was to protect the election you would have given the Trump campaign a defensive briefing. You could have disrupted any foreign activity in time to protect the U.S. election.
10. As to the FBI’s motives, that’s why we have Durham. I’m not saying the motivations were improper but it is premature to say weren’t.
Enter the Inspector General
11. The IG operates differently, as an internal watchdog. Horowitz’s approach is to say that if people involved give reasonable explanations for what appears to be wrongdoing and he cannot find documentary or testimonial evidence to the contrary he accepts their explanations.
12. Contrary to much reporting Horowitz did not rule out improper motivation. He did not find documentation of testimonial evidence of improper motive. Those are two different things.
13. Instead of talking to the Trump Campaign the FBI secretly wired up sources and had them talk with four people affiliated with the Trump Campaign in August, September, and October of 2016.
What’s the big deal with exculpatory information?
14. All of the information from the surveillance came back exculpatory regarding any supposed relationship with Russia and specific facts. But the FBI did not inform the FISA court, which approved wiretaps against a former Trump campaign aid, Carter Page four times.
15. At one point early on the FBI did not have enough probable cause for a wiretap warrant so it used the Steele dossier information, which it had done nothing to verify and used it to obtain the wiretaps.
16. The wiretaps allowed the FBI to go back and capture Carte Page’s communications, emails and other information from weeks, months and even years ago.
17. Should the four application to wiretap Trump campaign aid Carter Page have ever been made considering there were 17 critical errors or omissions by the FBI making it appear they had better evidence than they actually had? This is the meat of the issue and if you spend time to look at what happened, you would be appalled.
Is withholding information from the courts about warrant applications a big deal?
18. The FBI withheld from the FISA court all of the exculpatory evidence and the lack of reliability of the main FBI source, who was being paid by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign, to find evidence connecting Trump to Russia.
19. The major takeaway is that out of the election in January 2018 the FBI finally talked to one of Steele’s important sources to try to verify some of the dossier information and sources as they are required to do. The Steele source told the FBI he did not know what Steele was talking about in the dossier and that he had told Steele that the information he had provided was supposition and theory. At that point it was clear the dossier was a sham. The FBI did not tell the court and continued to get wiretaps based on the dossier.
20. The FBI falsely told the FISA court that Steele’s sources had been proven reliable and truthful. In fact what the source had told the truth about was that the dossier was garbage. It is hard to look at this and not think it is not gross abuse.
FISA SCHMIZA
21. Were the four FISA judges who approved the four wiretaps against Trump campaign associate Carter Page badly misled by the FBI? YES
22. Are people going to be held accountable, including at the very top levels of our intelligence agencies and the FBI? Well, they are all gone.
23. The whole Russia collusion hype was a bogus narrative hyped by an irresponsible press that proved entirely false in the end. A former FBI director James Comey and a former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe and others implicated in the Durham investigation; I think there was a failure of leadership in that group. Quoting the IG “The explanations he received were not satisfactory.” You can draw your own conclusions.
24. Why haven’t we already thrown people into prison? These things take time. The government has to have proof beyond a reasonable doubt before we indict. This is a substantial hurdle. Nobody is going to be indicted and go to jail unless that standard is met.
Now that you know some of what the Attorney General knows does it make you feel any different impeachment. How do you feel about what Attorney General Barr has told us?