566

UPDATE: This chapter clearly is a companion piece-a precursor to the later Horowitz chapter.

I strongly suspect this because:

1. For one thing Trump is a micromanager as his recent meddling with the GSA to get it to change its plans on a new FBI office, as documented in Chapter X.

2. Beyond that he clearly doesn’t understand the complex bureaucratic machinery of the U.S. government. He thinks of these various agencies as working for himself and as needing to be loyal to him rather than the American people. The idea that a high ranking government official feels loyalty to his/her agency and the country rather than simply Donald Trump-even if Trump appointed them, just never occurs to the Manchurian ‘President.’

3. As noted in Chapter Y the FBI is a very Republican place and during the 2016 it-particularly the NY FBI office-was known as Trumpland.

With 1 and 2 in mind, 3 is only more exacerbated. Since the rogue FBI agents -just as the Russians-successfully meddled in favor of Trump, you would expect that these rogue agents are even more emboldened today than a couple of years ago. On the other hand, those who choose to stand up to Trump in any way now risk their entire career and reputation-just see what happened to Strozk and Page. Considering that they knew Trump was being investigated by their own agency for colluding with Russia, perhaps their fears for the possibility of Trump ‘winning’ were understandable?

UPDATE: Indeed since the Ukraine if you’re listening scandal broke only now has the depth and breadth of Trump’s politicization of many executive offices come to light-State, Justice,  DHS, etc.

What’s hard to understand is Comey’s apparent lack of concern. All which makes you wonder if maybe Randol Schoenberg’s theory is on the right track regarding Comey-he honestly did believe the ‘golden emails’ may have been on Weiner’s laptop-maybe even hoped as Schoneberg suggests? And it is a fact that Comey was a long time partisan Republican.

UPDATE: This point is developed in Chapter Why the Comey Letter

There’s been a total house cleaning of the agents who are potential witnesses to Comey’s firing and can corroborate his version of events-Strozk, James Baker, Andy McCabe-regarding McCabe, see below. It seems very likely that today the FBI, DOJ, and the Inspector General’s office are dominated all the more by Trump loyalists. While this is, ahem, educated speculation, what is clear is that all the developments in the IG report on Emailgate have seemed to be in the pro Trump direction.

The date of the release of the report kept getting delayed-at one point we were hearing towards the end of 2017 then it was early 2018. Yet the IG seemed to show particular deference to the GOP Congress-they begun demanding information about one of their chosen bogeymen, Andy McCabe. The calls begun in December-only after McCabe backed up Comey’s version of events in his testimony and the IG released a report on McCabe within a couple of months. Meanwhile, the original subject of the investigation got obscured-this report had been requested in January, 2017 and the release of that information kept getting delayed. Meanwhile the demands of the GOP on McCabe moved to the front of the line.

As we saw in (Chapter D) McCabe was no ‘Clinton loyalist’-quite the opposite. He was a lifelong Republican whose wife ran as a Democrat. In the ‘logic’ of Trump and his apologists this makes McCabe not just a ‘Democrat but an ‘arch Clinton loyalist.’ Of course based on this premise Comey himself should never have been allowed to run the Emailgate investigation. After all-as we saw in (Chapter C) Comey was a life long Republican who donated to both of Obama’s Presidential opponents in 2008 and 2012.

UPDATE: Which one is Chapter D?

Yet Comey demanded that McCabe recuse himself from the fateful-fatefully bad-decision to do the Comey letter on October 27, 2016. Again, Comey was worried about ‘appearances’ but again, this concern only went in one direction-concern that anti Clinton people will think Clinton somehow is being protected-when it was quite the opposite.

What about the optics of a life long Republican who donated to both Obama’s opponents investigating the Democratic nominee-who Comey had spent much of the past 20 years investigating starting with Ken Starr’s Whitewater fishing expedition?

And what finally took McCabe down was his leak to the Wall Street Journal on Oct 31, 2016 about the investigation of the Clinton Foundation. But note that his motivation in this admittedly completely unacceptable leak was the same as Comey-to somehow reassure the Clinton haters that he wasn’t somehow protecting her.

And I guess you could argue it’s poetic justice of a kind that despite Comey, McCabe, and friends at the FBI bent over so far backwards to reassure the Clinton haters that they even rigged the election against her to prove they weren’t protecting her and to this day the Clinton haters still accuse them of being part of the anti Trump Deep State who gave Clinton special treatment. Stealing the election from her is their definition of ‘special treatment!’

Today Comey is attacked as a liar and leaker who was biased against ‘President Trump’ and McCabe was fired 26 hours before eligible for his pension just to mollify Trump.

Remember that Trump had demanded he be fired on December 23, 2017:

While there’s little question that  McCabe did violate policy in his CF leak the process used to drum him out totally violated policy and protocol, to fire him in such a vindictive way just to deny him his pension was clearly the handiwork of Trump himself. It was wholly unprecedented and out of step with protocol. 

UPDATE: We’re now hearing that Jeff Sessions the best little ureconstructed segregationist from Alabama is trying to take back his Senate seat as an arch Trump lickspittle. It’s ironic how much Trump came to despise him as Sessions really did do a lot of very problematic things for him. And it turns out that when Sessions drummed out McCabe, former FBI Deputy Director had opened a criminal probe into the segregationist AG two months earlier. 

UPDATE: In McCabe’s newly published book he reveals that Christopher Wray tried to get him to voluntarily resign in January, 2018-the month after Trump’s tweet.

FN: As we discuss in Chapter President Joe’s first mistake, there are a lot of very good reasons to fire Wray beyond the excellent reason that after 112 years of Republican FBI Directors it’s past time for a change.

UPDATE 2.

Further irony: with all the efforts to paint Page and Strozk as biased against Trump and supportive of Clinton, Page was actually who had directly fed McCabe’s story to the WSJ. 

This hardly helped Clinton, quite the opposite, it kicked her after she was down just three days post the Comey letter on October 28.

For some reason the IG investigation that had slow walked its investigation of Emailgate managed to get the McCabe report out a couple of months after the GOP Congress began demanding it.

Then the main IG report came out in June, 2018-so it took 18 months. A large part of it was about the texts of Strozk and Lisa Page as noted in (Chapter E). Indeed the first pages of the report jumped right into their texts-as if this was a top priority of the investigation-rather than the ways in which Emailgate was unfair to Clinton.

All I can say is that it’d be interesting if we could see the private texts and emails of all these rogue Trump agents as we’ve seen Strozk’s and Pages. Indeed, as noted in (Chapter F) Trump’s recent, new abuse of power was his desire to somehow leak all the texts and emails of those working on the Russia investigation.

The report did censure Comey both for the presser and the letter, correctly declaring him insubordinate. Still, if anything, he got off easy. In chapter (Y) we saw some of the choice things others in the intel community called Comey’s actions.

The report said nothing about the rogue anti Clinton pro Trump agents-though, supposedly, there will be a separate report out on this  in some unspecified time in the future.

It had better be out by early 2019. Democrats need to push IG on this.

UPDATE: Today is Saturday, February 23, 2019-the IG has not released this report and the Democrats have not pushed IG to release it.

UPDATE 2.0: And today is November 7, 2019 and they still haven’t released it nor have we heard a word about it in the last nine months between updates. The  Dems are now finally doing an impeachment inquiry-as part of their inquiry they ought to ask for answers from the IG on it’s failure to release its report on the rogue FBI agents 34 months after opening an investigation.

And nothing was said about Comey using a fake Russian document that he either did know or did not know was fake-honestly both possibilities are ‘worse’ they either say some very bad things about Comey’s honesty or his basic competence as we saw in Chapter A

In other words, the IG totally pulled its punches on Comey’s extremely careless investigation.

So clearly the IG’s investigation into Emailgate itself needs to be investigated. The IG also needs to be grilled as to the whereabouts of the still to be released report on the rogue agents as well as the whole natural history on Comey’s fake Russian doc-starting with who was the source? In (Chapter G) I conjectured Jospeh Schmitz.

UPDATE: We would finally learn that there were a lot of agents texting anti Clinton messages in 2016-not in part 2 of the Emailgate report which Horowitz would table but in yet another IG investigation Horowitz did for Comey-was it the report on the Dossier? But of course, Horowitz didn’t release the names on all this “unprecedented animus” against Clinton.

Again, the  Dems are now doing their impeachment inquiry but this needs to be yet another strand of it. What they should also look at is the IG investigation itself-was it itself compromised/politicized by Trump agents at any of the relevant agencies-DOJ itself as well as the FBI

UPDATE: Of course the Pelosi led Democrats were never going to do this, indeed, we now know that Nadler and his Judiciary had initially drawn up 10 articles of impeachment but Pelosi tabled everything focusing on just two very narrow articles on Ukraine Extortion.

Remember the first question you have to ask in cases like this is predicate and probable cause. Who made the decision to put the issue of Strozk’s and Page’s texts in the front of the line and why did they do so? Who found these texts and what were they looking for when they ‘just happened’ to come across them? Was it as ‘coincidental’ as when the anti Clinton NYPD agents ‘just happened’ to come across Huma Abedin’s emails on Weiner’s laptop?

Similarly McCabe-why did the issue of  him leaking about the FBI’s illegitimate, unpredicated  Clinton Foundation investigation come to the front of the line in priorities for the IG investigation-more important than the actual, original purpose which was the leaks of the anti Clinton pro Trump agents?

FN: In McCabe’s own lawsuit against Trump for the vindictive way he was pushed out he states that only when Trump didn’t like his answers in their conversation post firing Comey did he suddenly get questioned about his role in the Clinton Foundation story.

UPDATE: McCabe wins lawsuit-though it’s a fairly narrow victory-see EW

Meanwhile, over two years since the IG investigation into Emailgate was ordered we still don’t have an answer about the rogue agents but we know all about the texts of Page-Strozk and McCabe’s leaking about the improper, illegitimate, Clinton Foundation investigation. Why? Who made that decision over at IG?

UPDATE: While the IG dithers the NY FBI has been sued for the leaks of the rogue agents to Giuliani-who has a starring role in Ukrainian  Extortion.

https://hillreporter.com/ny-fbi-office-being-sued-for-leaking-sensitive-info-to-giuliani-17395

The lawsuit was necessary because of course Trumpland wasn’t interested in complying with a watchdog group’s legal request.

CREW has requested records relating to the FBI’s investigation into how Giuliani got advance notice of Comey’s investigations, but the FBI has yet to fulfill CREW’s request.

“The FBI legally has to give us these records or explain why they cannot,” CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “It is important for the public to have all of the information that the law requires be made available.”

UPDATE 2. Finally some news on the IG report on the rogue agents from Vanity Fair.

“The Republican chattersphere has been eagerly anticipating the conclusion of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s inquiry into alleged surveillance abuses by the Justice Department and the FBI, although it’s not entirely clear what might be in the final report. Federal investigators have conducted more than 100 interviews, including one with former British spy Christopher Steele, whose infamous dossier may have helped to secure a FISA warrant for former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Horowitz’s office declined to comment. But there are signs that the inspector general is continuing to pursue, separately, the answer to an equally explosive question: Exactly who at the FBI was talking to reporters about the Hillary Clinton email investigation—and possibly to Trump colleagues like Rudy Giuliani?”

So the investigation continues but for some reason has been greatly delayed and is taking forever-with the reports that Trump and his GOP co-conspirators about Strokz-Page, McCabe, Comey, the basis for the Russia Collusion investigation all lapping it for some wholly unknown, unexplained reason.

That was one cliff-hanger that Horowitz left unresolved with his previous 539-page report, on the FBI’s actions leading up to the 2016 president election, which focused on the bureau’s controversial investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server. That report detailed how FBI director James Comey’s fateful decision to publicly announce the discovery of additional, possibly relevant emails in the closing weeks of the campaign was driven significantly by his fear of leaks from his own agents. The final two unclassified pages of Horowitz’s June 2018 tome are graphic renderings of the problem: starburst diagrams with “reporter” at the center, and multiple lines radiating outward to trace hundreds of unauthorized contacts between journalists and FBI officials.

Indeed, Comey’s concern about the leaks of the rogue agents was so deep he opened an investigation-though to this day we know nothing about what it might have uncovered or wether it’s still active.

In his testimony before Congress he mentioned Giuliani by name. 

A transcript of Comey’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee last Friday gives us the former FBI director’s answer as to why he wrote the letter.

I was concerned that there appeared to be in the media a number of stories that might have been based on communications reporters or nonreporters like Rudy Giuliani were having with people in the New York field office. In particular, in I want to say mid October, maybe a little bit later, Mr. Giuliani was making statements that appeared to be based on his knowledge of workings inside the FBI New York. And then my recollection is there were other stories that were in the same ballpark that gave me a general concern that we may have a leak problem — unauthorized disclosure problem out of New York, and so I asked that it be investigated.

You might recall that on October 26th (two days before Comey released his letter), Giuliani told Fox News’s Martha MacCallum, “I do think that all of these revelations about Hillary Clinton are beginning to have an impact. [Trump’s] got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next two days.”

What Comey didn’t mention is that the FBI was also leaking the information to Rep. Devin Nunes, as he later went on to tell Laura Ingraham.

Josh Marshall noted that the FBI’s New York field office discovered Clinton emails on Weiner’s laptop on September 26th or 27th. By “late September,” they were leaking that information to Rep. Nunes and someone eventually spilled the beans to Rudy Giuliani, who was an advisor to the Trump campaign at the time.

FN: Chapter Nunes

Soon after his indefensible letter he expressed his concern over leaks to Loretta Lynch-who Comey had jammed on both the presser and the letter-Lynch failed in her own right to challenge Comey on both these decisions as she should have.

And [Comey] said, and he said to me that it had become clear to him, he didn’t say over the course of what investigation or whatever, he said it’s clear to me that there is a cadre of senior people in New York who have a deep and visceral hatred of Secretary Clinton. And he said it is, it is deep. It’s, and he said, he said it was surprising to him or stunning to him.

…But he was saying [bias] did exist, and it was hard to manage because these were agents that were very, very senior, or had even had timed out and were staying on, and therefore did not really feel under pressure from headquarters or anything to that effect.

Nothing to add but Action Amen here:

While it is important to investigate all of the ways that Russia attempted to influence the 2016 presidential election and to what extent the Trump campaign conspired with them to do so, it is also clear that rogue agents in the FBI’s New York field office played a significant role in electing Donald Trump due to their extreme anti-Clinton bias. We need to get to the bottom of that one too.”

Chairman Schiff and Speaker Pelosi are you listening?

UPDATE: In retrospect they most certainly were not the story of the FBI’s stealing the election from their own party’s Presidential candidate-the first major party female Presidential candidate-was never on their radar. Nadler had at one point wanted to look at it but Pelosi  vetoed it as she did so many things.

 

 

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