h/t Instapunditby James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John's University.
[Washington Examiner] As a self-proclaimed adherent to Hanlon’s Razor, I once cynically viewed the frenzied focus on FBI actions during the 2016 Russian election-meddling investigation as partisan and overwrought. Hanlon’s Razor suggests that we never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence. Having proudly served in the FBI for 25 years, I bristled at insulting accusations of an onerous deep state conspiracy. Some obvious mistakes made during the investigation of the Trump campaign were quite possibly the result of two ham-handedly overzealous FBI headquarters denizens, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, clumsily seeking to impress each other with ever-increasing levels of loathing for then-candidate Donald Trump.
...But as we anxiously await the expected reports, there recently appeared some fairly explosive allegations into potential investigator misconduct that have not received the attention they deserve. With her filing of a blistering Motion to Compel against federal prosecutors in the Michael Flynn case just made public, Sidney Powell has upended my adherence to Hanlon’s Razor.
...One of the most damning charges contained within Powell’s 37-page court brief is that Page, the DOJ lawyer assigned to the office of then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, may have materially altered Flynn’s interview FD-302, which was drafted by Strzok. FBI agents transfer handwritten interview notes onto a formal testimonial document, FD-302, within five days of conducting an interview, while recollections are still fresh.
It is unheard of for someone not actually on the interview itself to materially alter an FD-302. As an FBI agent, no one in my chain of command ever directed me to alter consequential wording. And as a longtime FBI supervisor, I never ever directed an agent to recollect something different from what they discerned during an interview. Returning a 302 for errors in grammar, punctuation, or syntax is appropriate. This occurs before the document is ultimately uploaded to a particular file, conjoined with the original interview notes which are safely secured inside a 1-A envelope, and secured as part of evidence at trial.
...So, did an accomplished 3-star general actually misrepresent the truth? Or, was his recollection of events later spun to be a mendacious accounting by overzealous investigators who followed their boss’s lead, while circumventing established protocol in an ambush-style interview? What apparently followed was a "tweaking" of the accounting to ensure Flynn be charged with Title 18 USC § 1001 ‐ something I have long argued was never charged by any U.S. Attorney’s Office during my time serving in the FBI unless we wanted to threaten it and employ as leverage.
Let me see if I got this one straight.
Cops, as movies teach us, have to record every interview: both video or sound. But FBI, sit down and write a report according to their recollections?
...Here’s me, acknowledging my mistake. I was dead wrong. It now seems there was a concerted effort, though isolated, within the upper-echelons of the FBI to influence the outcome of the Flynn investigation. By "dirtying up" Flynn, Comey’s FBI headquarters team of callow sycophants shortcut the investigative process. Arm-twisting Flynn through the "tweaked" version of his interview afforded him criminal exposure. The cocksure Comey team felt supremely confident that would inspire him "flipping" and give them the desperately sought-after evidence of Trump-Russia collusion that the wholly unverified Steele dossier was never remotely capable of providing.
I am physically nauseous as I type these words. I have long maintained that innocent mistakes were made and that the investigators at the center of this maelstrom were entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
No more.
They have tarnished the badge and forever stained an agency that deserved so much better from them. I am ashamed. The irreparable damage Comey’s team has done to the FBI will take a generation to reverse.
I ashamedly join Hanlon’s Razor in getting this one wrong.