90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, August 20, 2022

Think The FBI Deserves The Benefit Of The Doubt? This Laundry List Of Corruption Should Make You Think Again

A look at the FBI’s last six years shows a pattern of irredeemable corruption.

Can the FBI be trusted? A Federalist analysis of agency lies over the last decade is an unequivocal no.

FISA Warrants

In the summer of 2016, FBI bureaucrats launched a deep-state operation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, to thwart then-candidate Trump’s presidential ambitions. It began by targeting Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and quickly branched out as bureaucrats expanded their surveillance. The spy agency used the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as a legal pretext to investigate and spy on Papadopoulos, in addition to former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and former Trump adviser Carter Page. Several were interviewed by undercover FBI informant Stefan Halper, whose own investigation would prove a bust.

According to a declassified transcript between Papadopoulos and a Crossfire Hurricane confidential human source (CHS), Papadopoulos repeatedly denied the Trump campaign was working with Russian-backed entities to capture the 2016 election. The FBI, however, wrote off Papadopoulos’s recorded answers as rehearsed and omitted his denials of campaign collusion with overseas actors in FISA court warrant applications and renewals. These were two of the 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” identified in the Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general’s blockbuster report on the investigation in December 2019.

Papadopoulos, who pled guilty to making a false statement to the FBI in a perjury trap, was far from the only individual to face political persecution from the federal government’s dystopian investigation.

Not one of the four FISA warrants obtained by the FBI was legally justified, according to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report. In fact, at least two of the warrant applications to spy on Page were declared illegal by a federal judge. Following Horowitz’s blistering report outlining FBI misconduct throughout the entire operation, another federal judge declared that agency malfeasance “calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable.”

Subsequent reporting revealed gross abuses of power within the FBI to prosecute political opponents. According to Horowitz, the FBI’s FISA warrants “relied entirely” on DNC-funded opposition research compiled by former British intelligence official Christopher Steele known as the “Steele dossier.” The dossier, which outlined supposed Trump-Russia collusion and has since been thoroughly debunked, included salacious allegations such as supposed “pee tapes” featuring Trump engaging in golden showers with Russian prostitutes at a Moscow hotel.

The FBI knew the dossier lacked credibility as early as January 2017 and knew Steele’s material itself contained Russian disinformation. Desperate to continue their deep-state operation, however, officials lied to the FISA court about Steele’s credibility and hid incriminating info related to the former British intelligence official who was later fired over leaks to the press. An 18th omission, overlooked by the inspector general’s report but documented by Federalist Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland, was that Steele’s sources did not include the ones he developed as a British official.

Even after Steele’s termination as a reliable source, DOJ attorney Bruce Ohr continued to feed information from Steele to the FBI over the course of its investigation. Steele met with Ohr 12 times after the former’s tenure ended as a confidential human source for the bureau, according to the inspector general. Ohr also promoted his wife’s opposition research to FBI investigators and did not disclose she was paid by Fusion GPS, the DNC-contracted firm that commissioned the Steele dossier.

The FBI never told the FISA court that the Trump dossier written by a source who was fired for lying, did not undergo independent verification, and was funded by Hillary Clinton and the DNC.

Despite the overt abuse of the nation’s surveillance apparatus to spy on political opponents, only one FBI official has faced criminal conviction for his role in the probe. In January last year, former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced to just 12 months probation after pleading guilty to fabricating evidence to obtain a FISA warrant. By December, Clinesmith was re-admitted to the D.C. Bar Association in good...

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The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1816

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Hot Pick Of The Late Night

Girls With Guns

Visage à trois #418

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #599

Shame the FBI or Abuses Will Escalate

If the FBI can selectively leak portions of the affidavit agents used to justify the search of Mar-a-Lago, then why should it be allowed to conceal the rest of the affidavit?

I have been unable to locate any condemnation by the FBI of the leaks to the New York Times of the “highly sensitive information about witnesses, including witnesses interviewed by the government,” in connection with the Mar-a-Lago raid. That’s strange because only a day earlier the Justice Department told a federal judge that releasing the names of these witnesses would, “jeopardize the integrity of this national security investigation.” The silence is deafening.

On Monday, the Department of Justice filed an opposition to the release of the affidavit the FBI used to justify its “panty raid” on Mar-a-Lago.“Disclosure at this juncture of the affidavit supporting probable cause would, by contrast, cause significant and irreparable damage to this ongoing criminal investigation,” the government argued. “As the Court is aware from its review of the affidavit, it contains, among other critically important and detailed investigative facts: highly sensitive information about witnesses, including witnesses interviewed by the government.”

The very next day, within 24 hours, the Times published an article exposing “Pat A. Cipollone and Patrick F. Philbin, the White House counsel and his deputy under President Donald J. Trump,” as the very witnesses whose identity the Department of Justice said it wanted to protect. If this were a real investigation, the target would now be warned to be careful talking to these two witnesses.

The source for the Times article? “Three people familiar with the matter.” It’s conceivable that at the very moment a Justice Department lawyer wrote the warning to the court about revealing witness identities, three of the involved FBI agents were doing just that.

Of course, there will be no condemnation of the leaks of the identity of these witnesses because it’s part of the FBI’s public relations campaign and election interference strategy. In spite of the FBI constantly seeking secrecy to protect its “sources and methods,” it’s more than happy to leak its sources as one of its very dirty methods.

If all of this seems vaguely familiar, it’s probably because of the many developing parallels between the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago panty raid and its Russian collusion hoax perpetrated to obtain a FISA warrant. Then, as now, the FBI leaked supposedly secret details of its investigation to mount a politically inspired public relations campaign against Trump. The election-year leaks accusing Trump campaign figure Carter Page of being a Russian spy became so flagrant that Page wrote an open letter to the FBI demanding an opportunity to clear his name. He wrote,

I am writing to request the FBI’s prompt end of the reported inquiry regarding my personal trip to Russia in July 2016—an investigation which has been widely mentioned in the media . . . Although I have not been contacted by any member of your team in recent months, I would eagerly await their call to discuss any final questions they might possibly have in the interest of helping them put these outrageous allegations to rest while allowing each of us to shift our attention to relevant matters.

In the case of the Carter Page FISA warrants, the FBI fought a vigorous battle to protect the supporting affidavits from public view. No wonder. While it claimed then that it was merely protecting “sources and methods,” it turned out that its sources included the debunked Steele dossier procured by Hillary Clinton and its “methods” included lying to the FISA court to get...

Judge ruled in 2012 that a president's discretion to declare records "personal" is far-reaching and mostly unchallengeable.

When it comes to the National Archives, history has a funny way of repeating itself. And legal experts say a decade-old case over audio tapes that Bill Clinton once kept in his sock drawer may have significant impact over the FBI search of Melania Trump's closet and Donald Trump's personal office.

The case in question is titled Judicial Watch v. National Archives and Records Administration and it involved an effort by the conservative watchdog to compel the Archives to forcibly seize hours of audio recordings that Clinton made during his presidency with historian Taylor Branch.

For pop culture, the case is most memorable for the revelation that the 42nd president for a time stored the audio tapes in his sock drawer at the White House. The tapes became the focal point of a 2009 book that Branch wrote.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington D.C. ultimately rejected Judicial Watch's suit by concluding there was no provision in the Presidential Records Act to force the National Archives to seize records from a former president.

But Jackson's ruling — along with the Justice Department's arguments that preceded it — made some other sweeping declarations that have more direct relevance to the FBI's decision to seize handwritten notes and files Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago. The most relevant is that a president's discretion on what are personal vs. official records is far-reaching and solely his, as is his ability to declassify or destroy records at will.

"Under the statutory scheme established by the PRA, the decision to segregate personal materials from Presidential records is made by the President, during the President's term and in his sole discretion," Jackson wrote in her March 2012 decision, which was never appealed.

"Since the President is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of Presidential records during his time in office, it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be...