90 Miles From Tyranny

Friday, November 22, 2019

HUGE: FBI lawyer under criminal investigation for altering document related to Carter Page surveillance

This information was leaked to CNN by an entity that is intentionally trying to diminish the December 9th release of the SHOCKING FISA Abuse Report.

An FBI lawyer is under criminal investigation for allegedly altering a document related to the surveillance of onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The lower-level line attorney, who is no longer with the bureau, is being scrutinized by U.S. Attorney John Durham as part of his criminal investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation, according to CNN.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz uncovered the document as part of his investigation into alleged Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses, which concluded in September, and has been in contact with Durham. The Connecticut-based prosecutor's administrative review, overseen by Attorney General William Barr, turned into a criminal investigation this fall, giving Durham the power to impanel a grand jury and hand down indictments.

No charges relevant to the situation appear to have been filed in court. A Justice Department representative did not immediately return a request for comment.

Horowitz's team interviewed the FBI official, who admitted to making a change to the document. Unclear is how much sway the document had in the FBI's effort to obtain warrants approved by the FISA Court to electronically surveil Page, but the change to the document was substantive enough to twist its meaning.

"If there was an FBI agent sworn to uphold the Constitution who can be proven to have altered the document in connection with a legal proceeding, including the obtaining of a FISA warrant, that's really serious. It doesn't get a lot more serious than that," former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said Thursday evening on CNN.

Horowitz confirmed Thursday that he expects his FISA report to be released to the public on Dec 9. He has also predicted minimal redactions after a classification review and final session for witnesses to provide feedback.

Republicans believe Horowitz's report will reveal an effort to undermine President Trump's 2016 campaign in which the FBI misled the FISA Court in its reliance on an unverified dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele, whose research about Trump and his associates was partially funded by Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the Perkins Coie law firm. Some have even predicted indictments and prison time for officials who signed off on the warrants.

Democrats, as well as current and former FBI officials, have dismissed allegations of wrongdoing and have raised concerns that information about U.S. intelligence-gathering could be leveraged to discredit...

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Russia case agent Strzok cited for misconduct, security violation and ‘exceptionally poor judgment’ in FBI memos

This summer, ex-FBI agent Peter Strzok filed a lawsuit suggesting his firing was political retribution for having run the bureau’s counterintelligence investigation into the now debunked allegations that Donald Trump and Russia colluded to hijack the 2016 election.

The Justice Department has responded to the lawsuit in a big way, releasing to the court presiding over the civil case Strzok’s official misconduct file that concluded the former FBI supervisor exhibited “a gross lack of professionalism and exceptionally poor judgment.”

It shows the FBI substantiated that Strzok had engaged in dereliction of duty, had committed misconduct through the expression of anti-Trump bias on his official FBI phone and committed security violations by performing official government work on personal email.

The records show one official recommended termination, and another recommended suspension for 60 days without pay. The bureau leadership chose the more severe of the two penalties, terminating Strzok last year.

The dereliction of duty citation involved Strzok’s failure, according to the FBI, to quickly follow up in fall 2016 after the belated discovery of a trove of Hillary Clinton emails on a laptop belonging to former Congressman Anthony Weiner and his wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

Strzok was supervising the investigation of whether Clinton’s use of personal email for classified State Department matters created a security risk, and his failure caused an unnecessary delay to evaluate the new evidence just weeks before Election Day, the FBI concluded.

The disciplinary file included testimony from one of Strzok’s colleagues, a fellow agent, about the failure to respond to the discovery of emails. “The crickets I was hearing was making me uncomfortable because something was going to come crashing down,” the agent testified. “….I still to this day don’t understand what the hell went wrong.”

The agent testified he feared “somebody was not acting appropriately, somebody was trying to bury this” discovery of new Clinton email evidence, the files show.

Strzok offered a bevy of excuses for his inaction, including he was busy working the Trump-Russia case at the time. All were rejected. “The investigation reveals that there is no reasonable excuse for the FBI’s delay in following up on...

This Has Definitely Gotten Worse Since Trump Became President...

Fight Like Your Country Depends On It...

..Because It Does Depend On It.

The Most Important News Story Right Now Isn’t Impeachment, It’s The Crisis In Mexico

Cartels in Mexico aren’t just fighting over drugs, they’re fighting over industries, and it might well trigger a new and much bigger migrant crisis on the U.S. border.

Two important and interrelated news stories largely passed under the radar Wednesday as the House impeachment hearings continued to dominate the headlines. Both stories concern the deteriorating state of affairs in Mexico and have huge implications for immigration, the southwest border, and U.S. national security. It’s a shame more Americans aren’t paying attention.

The first was a report from BuzzFeed that as of Wednesday the Trump administration began carrying out a controversial plan to deport asylum-seekers from El Salvador and Honduras—not to their home countries, but to Guatemala, which the administration has designated a “safe third country,” meaning that migrants from those countries must first apply for asylum in Guatemala before seeking asylum in the United States.

The move is part of the administration’s broader strategy to reduce the number of Central Americans seeking asylum at the southwest border, which last year saw a dramatic increase in illegal immigration largely driven by families and minors from the so-called Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

The second story was a Los Angeles Times dispatch from the Mexican state of Michoacán, where rival cartels are waging war not over drug trafficking routes but over control of the multibillion-dollar avocado industry. More than a dozen criminal groups are fighting over the avocado trade in and around Uruapan, the capitol of Michoacán, “preying on wealthy orchard owners, the laborers who pick the fruit and the drivers who truck it north to the United States,” writes reporter Kate Linthicum. Organized crime in Mexico, she explains, is diversifying—it isn’t just about drugs anymore: