A newly declassified transcript calls into question the entire Crossfire Hurricane investigation: Why was it started, and why did it continue?
Attorney General William Barr said last week that “the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness” in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Rather, “there is something far more troubling here.”
“Without any basis,” Barr added in his sit-down interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, “they started this investigation of [Trump’s] campaign, and even more concerning actually is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president to sabotage his presidency — or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”
While Barr did not elaborate on the evidence he’s seen, a declassified transcript made public earlier in the week of a wired conservation between former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and a Crossfire Hurricane confidential human source (CHS), when read in tandem with Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuse, substantiates Barr’s view that it wasn’t “just mistakes.”
When the transcript of the CHS’s secretly recorded conversation with Papadopoulos was released last week, the media highlighted his adamant denial of any Trump-campaign involvement into the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s emails. The coverage also focused on Papadopoulos’s denials being withheld from the FISA court.
But we already knew that: The IG’s report identified the failure to inform the FISA court of Papadopoulos’s denials as two of the 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions.” Specifically, the IG report noted the initial FISA application “[o]mitted Papadopoulos’s consensually monitored statements to an FBI CHS in September 2016 denying that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was collaborating with Russia or with outside groups like Wikileaks in the release of emails.”
The report explained that error was repeated in the three subsequent FISA renewal applications, adding that those applications also “[o]mitted Papadopoulos’s statements to an FBI CHS in late October 2016 denying that the Trump campaign was involved in the circumstances of the DNC email hack.”
Crossfire Hurricane Team Ignores Papadopoulos’ Words
The declassified transcript, however, does much more than hammer home the FISA abuse. It reveals a stark difference between Papadopoulos’s September 2016 denial of involvement in the DNC email hack and his denial a month later.
The Sept. 15, 2016, wired conversation was between Papadopoulos and Stefan Halper, whom the IG report identified as...
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