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| -Lurid Crime Tales- |
| Strassel: Will the FBI Come Clean? |
| 2018-07-06 |
| [WSJ] In the trench war between congressional Republicans and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we have arrived at a crucial battle. A House resolution sets Friday as the deadline for the Justice Department to come clean on the beginning of its investigation into the Trump campaign. We’ll find out if the FBI has been lying to the public. That is, if the department complies. It has flouted so many subpoenas, and played so many games with redactions and deadlines, that the entire House GOP united last week to vote for the resolution demanding submission to Congress’s requests for documents. The vote was an order but also a warning‐that this is the last chance to comply, and the next step will be to hold officials in contempt. It is a measure of the stakes that even that threat doesn’t guarantee cooperation. At issue is the FBI’s "origin story," in which it claims its full-fledged investigation into a presidential campaign was conducted, as it were, by the book. According to this narrative, the FBI did not launch its probe until July 31, 2016, only after Australia tipped it to a conversation junior Trump aide George Papadopoulos had with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in the spring of 2016 in London. Only after this formal commencement of a counterintelligence probe‐Crossfire Hurricane‐did the FBI begin to target U.S. citizens with spying, wiretapping and other tools usually reserved for foreign infiltrators. Or so the story goes. This account, relayed by the New York Times in December 2017, has proved highly convenient for the FBI. The Australian "government" connection allowed the bureau to infuse the meaningless Papadopoulos conversation with significance, justifying the probe. The origin story suggested the FBI had followed procedure. Mostly, it countered the growing suspicion that the bureau had been snooping on a presidential campaign on the basis of truly disreputable info‐a dossier of salacious information compiled by an opposition research firm working for the rival campaign. The story is full of holes, and they are widening. No one has explained why two months passed between the Papadopoulos-Downer conversation and the July 31 probe. We’ve learned that it wasn’t Australian intelligence that passed along the info, but Mr. Downer personally, to State Department personnel in violation of procedure. And a growing list of Trump officials now relate moments when they were approached by suspicious figures before July 31. That’s why congressional investigators have come to suspect the real origin story is very different. They believe the FBI was investigating Trump officials well before July 31, on the basis of the dossier and dubious information from State Department officials. They think the bureau was employing a variety of counterintelligence tools before there was an official counterintelligence probe‐and that this included deploying spies against political actors. They suspect that only when the FBI decided that it wanted to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Trump aide Carter Page (which requires an official investigation) did it surface the Downer information (collected back in May) and make it the official pretext in July. This theory is at the heart of the standoff with the Justice Department, which focuses on FBI actions prior to July 31. I’m told that multiple senior congressional members have repeatedly asked Justice Department leadership to affirm that the department had provided Congress everything relevant with regard to the Trump investigation. The department has said yes. Yet investigators have credible evidence pointing to the use of FBI informants against the Trump campaign earlier than July 31, and last week’s resolution requires the department to answer whether that is true, and if so, on what basis they were used. The FBI and its media allies have waged a ceaseless campaign to lower the bar on what counts as appropriate. We are told it is OK that the government opened a counterintelligence probe into a presidential campaign. OK that it obtained a warrant to spy on a U.S. citizen. OK that it based that warrant on an unverified dossier from the Democratic campaign, and then hid that true origin from the FISA court. OK that it paid a spy to target domestic political actors. It’s not OK. Not so long ago, the FBI would have quailed at the idea of running an informant into any U.S. political operation‐even into, say, a congressman under criminal investigation for bribery or corruption. These are the most sensitive of lines. But Mr. Trump’s opponents, in government and media, have a boundless capacity to justify any measures against the president. If it turns out that the Justice Department and FBI lied about how and when this all started, that is scandalous. Worse if it comes out that senior officials lied to Congress about whether they had complied with its demands for information. And once again, it is a reason for Mr. Trump to step in and declassify everything. Emphasis added. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #5 Certainly will not come clean while Mr. MaGoo Sessions is leading the Justice Department. |
| Posted by: Airandee 2018-07-06 17:38 |
| #4 Trump should send federal marshals over to seize everything and arrest anyone resisting. Maybe it's time to drop the FBI and hand it all back over to the Marshal service. As for the CIA, it should be quietly shot in the head and the OSS brought back under it's original rules. |
| Posted by: Silentbrick 2018-07-06 12:54 |
| #3 If Congress holds these people in contempt, that is all the excuse Trump needs to terminate their employment. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2018-07-06 11:19 |
| #2 No. Next question. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2018-07-06 11:11 |
| #1 FBI Come Clean? Quite unlikely. It's much larger than the FBI. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2018-07-06 10:21 |