90 Comey’s October Surprise Wasn’t a Surprise for Devin Nunes
Overall the chapter looks good-both substantively and largely edtting wise. However at the end I touch on Lisa Page/McCabe getting kicked out of meeting. Believe this was discussed in Chapter Why the Comey Letter.
UPDATE:
When it came out in late 2020 I had read Barrett’s book October Surprise with no little interest and while it certainly was interesting, it raised far more questions than it answered.
On the central question of rogue anti Clinton FBI agents leaking to defeat Clinton, Barrett dismisses the very idea as absurd on its face-you have to be a lurid conspiracy theorist to even consider that, he seems to think. The question of the rogue FBI agents was the subject of Michael Horowitz’s IG investigation he’d opened in January, 2017.
After opening it just before the start of the Trump Administration, Horowitz would never end up releasing the report at all. He did after Trump left put out a cursory 10 page ‘summary’-that said little other than that there were so many rogue agents leaking that he couldn’t isolate any in particular.
Weird as that hadn’t stopped Andy McCabe from being fired 26 hours before his pension-his leaks were somehow able to be ‘isolated.’
To be sure, subtly Horowitz’s and Barrett’s positions differ-Horowitz’s-dubious-argument was that everybody was doing it so there was nothing that we could do about it-not even naming the 100 different leakers. Barrett’s position was that there were no leaks and the very notion that they were was fanciful. Yep no leaks other than those who leaked about McCabe and his wife-to Barrett.
Had it not been for Barrett’s damnable hit piece on McCabe fueled by anti Clinton rogue agents, McCabe would never have leaked a rebuttal and wouldn’t have then been sandbagged.
UPDATE: Chapter Horowitz covers this-does this little snippet belong here?
FN: He did recently win his lawsuit though as Emptywheel argues the outcome is far from entirely satisfactory.
This link belongs in Chapter McCabe
UPDATE: It was easy for the FBI to “miss” Joe Biggs as they didn’t want to find him. Chapter Trumpland?
End FN
Yet Barrett claims there were no leakers? Maybe ‘leaker’ doesn’t mean what he thinks it means? If he doubts there were anti Clinton FBI agents leaking, he ought to talk to Devin Nunes.
Indeed, in Chapter Joseph Schmitz Questions Begged, I’d argued that one of the many implications of Barbara Leeden’s proposal to work with foreign intel to find Clinton’s emails is that this was not just a story about the Trump campaign but the Republican party.
Unredacted testimony from the Mueller investigation from Flynn revealed that the RNC also knew about the DNC leak in advance. From that I conjectured that the RNC likely then knew in advance of further leaks-the Podesta leaks as well as the Comey Letter.
After all, they had prior knowledge of the DNC hacks before the conventions. After the conventions the RNC’s top two officials-Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer-would join the Trump campaign. The idea that they would get less inside information after their two top officials joined the campaign than prior doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Regarding “they” I was talking particularly about the RNC but also argued that it likely applies to large swathes of the party as a whole. After all, does anyone think that anyone in GOPLand in 2016 who came across such information would keep it to themselves?
And surely Leeden-Grassley’s Judiciary aide-was in the loop.
And lo and behold, in June, 2018 Devin Nunes himself admitted to knowing about Huma Abedin’s emails all the way back in September, 2016-a month prior to the Comey Letter.
On Thursday night, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House intelligence committee, said for the first time that he knew about the discovery of Clinton emails on Weiner’s computer early on, but he couldn’t say anything because the information was classified.”
That’s a continuing problem, Nunes said:
“Let me tell you what we (knew) about that (Weiner laptop) at the time,” Nunes told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. “So we actually had — I’ve never actually said this before, because we had whistle-blowers, but we couldn’t really use the information, but now that it’s in the IG report, we can.
“We had whistle-blowers that came to us in late September of 2016 who talked to us about this laptop sitting up in New York that had additional emails on it. The House intelligence committee, we had that, but we couldn’t do anything with it.”
Nunes said he remembers learning about the emails on Weiner’s laptop in “late September.”
“So good FBI agents brought this to our attention, but what could we do with it? …Because you know why I say that, because it was all classified and this is the game that Comey and company have been playing, that they hide behind this (classification).’
Uh-good FBI agents?! Devlin Barrett are you listening? What made those agents “good” in Nunes’ mind is they were leaking about Huma Abedin’s emails back in September of that year-leaking to GOP Congressional Chairmen like himself..
There have been a lot of bombshells but it’s hard to overstate how consequential this revelation is. At the time it kind of went over everyone’s head-as there was so much new information coming out every day. But Nunes-the Chairman of the GOP HSPCI knew about Huma’s emails already a month before the Comey Letter.
Note also he says not ‘I knew’ but ‘we knew.’ Who was this we? My guess more or less the entire GOP leadership-both inside Congress and outside: the Trump campaign, remember by then Bannon was the campaign manager, Priebus, Spicer etc-we all know about Giuliani as well as Right wing media hacks like Sean Hannity; Bannon wore multiple hats both running the Trump campaign and as head of Breitbart.
At a minimum I presume “we” includes the other GOP chairmen-Trey Gowdy, Darrell Issa, et al.
FN: Of course Stone-Corsi-Smith were beyond merely having prior early knowledge, they actively made it happen-Chapter Unreported Background
This begs an awful lot of other questions. After all, Comey had at least initially claimed to have only learned about the emails in late October-a month after Nunes already learned about them. Horowitz says he didn’t know which leaks to isolate-how about the ‘good FBI agents’ that leaked this information to the Republican Chairman of the HSPCI?
I’ve argued elsewhere-in Chapter Why the Comey Letter-that nothing about the timeline from Comey or any of his staff regarding Emailgate from the time Barrett’s buddy, John Robertson-allegedly-first found them-to when Comey sent the Comey Letter ONLY to the GOP Committee Chairmen-is reliable. Not Comey, not Jim Baker, not Lisa Page, not McCabe-none of them are telling anything like the whole truth as it’s too embarrassing for themselves and the FBI.
But this also calls Robertson’s own timeline into considerable question. I mean Robertson claimed to just innocently come across them and have no anti Clinton political agenda. Then how did Devin Nunes and the rest of his “we” learn about it within days if not hours of Robertson’s allegedly accidentally finding them?
FN: I say ‘came across them’ but it’s even worse than that-as we see in Chapter Why the Comey Letter it was one single Huma-Hillary email out of 300,000. Again, Robertson is missing his calling-as a professional lottery winner.
End FN
UPDATE: So basically the FBI-at least the NYFBI-leaked to the GOP Congress about Huma’s emails a full month before the Comey Letter.
Obviously to get to the truth you’d have to question him and everyone he allegedly spoke to. But this confirms my conjecture-basically the entire Republican party knew in advance of the Comey Letter-they knew at least very soon after Robertson claims to have found it on accident on September 27.
To be clear I don’t know that Robertson himself called Nunes on the phone to tell him. Just that his story begs a number of questions in light of Nunes’ own revelation. At the very minimum you suspect him of lies of omission-there’s a lot he’s leaving out-as likely is Barrett. Though more on him below.
As to who Nunes learned from-there are many suspects-maybe he learned of it from Roger Stone or Erik Prince. Remember based on Matt Tait’s testimony, Peter Smith’s operation was basically a Trump campaign operation just disguised as a splinter thing for deniability.
FN: Though let’s not sleep on Giuliani or Bernard Kerik
https://perma.cc/9QYK-FF7W
But whoever he learned it from it leaves us to with a timeline where Nunes knew about the emails before James Comey or Andy McCabe.
UPDATE:
Vanity Fair:
Congress asked Comey to testify again on September 12, but he reportedly declined. They asked again, on September 28. This time, he obliged, and confirmed that the F.B.I. would not reopen its investigation. No findings at that point “would come near” to prompting such a measure, he told the congressmen. Louie Gohmert (Republican, Texas) continued the Republican harangue: “[The F.B.I. has] never seen anything like this.”
Agreeing to appear in front of the House Judiciary Committee about the investigation was yet another mistake, many believe, forcing Comey to answer questions he normally wouldn’t have. Lamar Smith (Republican, Texas) asked him if he’d reopen the case if he found new information. “It’s hard for me to answer in the abstract,” said Comey, who was under oath. “We would certainly look at any new and substantial information.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/02/james-comey-fbi-director-letter
Does this belong in Chapter October Surprise?
Note however that by this date, Devin Nunes and likely other GOP Chairmen knew of Weiner’s laptop-a decent bet that Goehmert knew-indeed, supposedly Comey hadn’t heard about Huma’s emails on Weiner’s laptop at that point so when Goehmert asked this question he had something very specific in mind that went over Comey’s head at that point.
End UPDATE
As for Barrett, much of what he says in his book doesn’t add up.
Schoenblog does a great job skewering him.
“While the source of the Access Hollywood tape remains an unsolved mystery, much has been written about the Russian government hacking of the DNC emails and the subsequent release by WikiLeaks, as well as the decision by James Comey to reopen the Clinton email investigation. Still, some further mysteries remain, and Devlin Barrett’s role is one of them, notwithstanding his new book.”
“An October 12, 2019 New York Times story on James Comey revealed that the former FBI director is a fan of Hanlon’s razor, the maxim “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” It’s a great rule of thumb that helps you avoid speculation about people’s motives. And I believe it explains most of what happened with the re-opening of the Clinton e-mail investigation, which was just one mistake after another. The surprising thing to me is that no one seems to have noticed the errors, not least of all the participants who played a key role, including both Comey and Barrett.”
FN: To be clear I don’t at all subscribe to Hanlon’s razor-if it is great at anything it’s at obscuring and hiding malign, partisan motives. The rule of thumb I subscribe to certainly regarding the Stolen Election of 2016 is be extremely skeptical of coincidences that are too convenient. OTOH I certainly agree with Schoenberg that we have not yet scratched the surface of the mystery of Barrett’s involvement other than that both he and Comey would quite desperately prefer we take Hanlon’s razor at face value-ie leave the explosive question of motives alone and just assume their good faith.
No, to understand 2016 the right maxim isn’t Hanlon’s rule but Nance’s Law.
Nance’s Law: Coincidence Takes A lot of Planning. https://t.co/TaVlduUwK3
— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) October 19, 2018
But nowhere is Nance’s Law more applicable than the subject of what was going on in at the FBI in the month between Robertson on September 27 and the Comey Letter on October 28.
But back to Schoenberg:
“The re-opening of the Clinton e-mail investigation at the end of October 2016 was the result of two independent complaints from within the FBI that managed, by coincidence, to create a maelstrom. ”
Again, Nance’s Law. Or Joyce Vance who said “there are no coincidences in law enforcement.
‘I greatly doubt this maelstrom was a coincidence. Or FDR who said there are no coincidences in politics-and despite Comey’s moral preening, what happened at the FBI in 2016, especially in the month between Robertson’s Immaculate Discovery and the Comey Letter was all about politics. The FBI may lecture us they are not about politics but they can get back to us after they have an actual Democratic Director-at this point they never have after 113 years. More below.
“The first of these complaints has already been well-documented, but Barrett provides even more details. On September 27, John Robertson the FBI special agent in New York who was tasked with searching the laptop of Anthony Weiner for evidence of his sexting an underage girl discovered that the laptop also contained a large cache of emails (over 340,000) from Huma Abedin’s account, including many from the time when she was working as Secretary Clinton’s assistant at the State Department. The agent dutifully notified his superiors and the information was passed on to Washington the very next day. Pretty much everyone on the Midyear leadership team was informed (although Comey later said he did not remember hearing about it).”
FN: Once again Comey is the odd man out just like how only he still claims the Russian document was real.
“The team was led by Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and included Executive Assistant Director Michael Steinbach, Associate Director Bill Priestap, Agent Lead Peter Strzok and a Supervisory Special Agent (“SSA”) (whose name has never been disclosed). The SSA was given the task of investigating further. A warrant would be needed if anyone wanted to review the emails.”
And then nothing happened. The Inspector General Michael Horowitz in his June 2018 report found four explanations for this inaction: (1) the FBI was waiting for additional information, (2) the FBI needed a search warrant, (3) the FBI did not believe that the information was likely to be significant, and (4) members of the team were reassigned to the investigation of Russian interference into the election. Horowitz took the FBI to task for not following up quickly, finding the various explanations “unpersuasive justifications for not acting sooner.” But Horowitz was clearly wrong. The two middle explanations — the FBI needed a search warrant and no one thought the information would be significant — were not only absolutely true and correct, but also dispositive. You cannot get a search warrant without probable cause, and if there was absolutely no indication that the emails would constitute evidence of a crime, there was no probable cause. Without probable cause, no further investigative steps were possible.”
“But of course the agent in New York who discovered the emails didn’t know that. He waited impatiently for someone to call him and became increasingly worried that no one was following up. Barrett does an excellent job in his book of recounting Robertson’s increasing anxiety as the weeks went by. According to Barrett’s account, Robertson worried that “someday angry members of Congress would come after him.” He told his supervisors at the SDNY U.S. Attorney’s Office that he feared that “this is going to make us look really, really horrible.” Concerned that Robertson would do something rash, on October 20 the two supervisors went up the chain of command in the US Attorney’s Office, while Robertson wrote himself an anguished “memo to self.”
I mean excellent job to the extent you believe Roberston-or Barrett-when in reality there are many good reasons to be skeptical of both. As we saw above, Nunes learned of these emails within a day or two from when Robertson first allegedly discovered them.
By coincidence that same week,
FN: Again these coincidences were all way too convenient
UPDATE: Seems to me that the question of who leaked to Nunes and Friends is closely related to why it took a month to go for a warrant
“Barrett was working on a story about Andrew McCabe and had started asking questions concerning $675,288 in donations by The Virginia Democratic Party and Common Good CA, a political action committee run by Virginia Governor Terry McCauliffe, to McCabe’s wife Dr. Jill McCabe’s unsuccessful 2015 campaign for Virginia state senate. The genesis of this news story is something that Barrett does not reveal in his book, but it is actually more significant than the story itself. Apparently Barrett had heard from “a number of people inside the FBI” who were concerned that the donations to McCabe’s wife’s campaign created a conflict of interest for McCabe, even though the FBI’s top ethics official, Patrick Kelley, had determined that there was no problem since McCabe’s wife’s campaign had ended before McCabe was assigned responsibility for the Clinton e-mail case, and the connection to Hillary Clinton, via McCauliffe, the former chair of Bill Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign was attenuated, at best. That there might be a few disgruntled FBI personnel eager to take digs at McCabe, an ambitious, rising star in the office, is hardly news. Most journalists would have dismissed the story as typical inter-office back-biting.”
And Barrett claims not to be aware of any leaks when clearly they were the basis for his hit piece on McCabe. But I certainly agree foursquare with Scheonberg that it’s curious why Barrett took these leaks so seriously.
“But not Barrett. The matter “didn’t sit well” with him. By complete coincidence, this minor, gossipy snipe against McCabe set Barrett off on a Proustian reverie that would have enormous consequences. When Barrett was young, he tells us, his mother also ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature in New York. As he was only nine years old, he said he had paid little attention at the time.
FN: Again, coincidences take a lot of planning.
But I also remembered, years later when I was in high school, riding in her rusty Subaru sedan one day, she noticed a local businessman strolling down the sidewalk of out hometown. My mother sighed and reminisced about how the businessman had donated to her long-ago campaign. She not only remembered the donation, which was for no more than a few hundred dollars, but she still felt somewhat guilty about it, like she’d let him down.
“Leaving aside the very remote likelihood that any person would actually have this sort of memory, the obvious differences between Barrett’s story and the McCabe situation seem not to have been noticed by the journalist. Yes, Barrett’s mother might have expressed pangs of regret upon the sight of a former donor. But would Barrett’s father have expressed similar feelings, not towards the donor himself, but towards a former boss of the donor to his wife’s campaign? That is the McCabe situation. If that type of attenuated Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon guilt by association is evidence of a disqualifying conflict of interest for a Deputy FBI Director, then good luck finding anyone in Washington to supervise an investigation of anyone else. (By way of comparison, try finding any sort of discussion about the obvious conflict of interest when a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals appointed Kenneth Starr in 1994 to investigate the suicide death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster and the Whitewater real estate investments of Bill Clinton. Starr had lost his job as Solicitor General, and a likely Supreme Court appointment, when Bill Clinton defeated his boss George H.W. Bush in 1992.) No, the real story was not the story about McCabe and any conflict of interest, it was that anyone would take seriously this type of phony allegation against McCabe. It was the very type of story that Barrett’s mentor Sandy Johnson had warned him about, a “false narrative” that was “hard to disprove or counter.”
“The Wall Street Journal posted Barrett’s hatchet piece on McCabe on Sunday night, October 23, and it appeared in the print edition the next day above the fold. That same morning, McCabe attended a regularly scheduled 9:00 a.m. briefing for Attorney General Loretta Lynch, after which George Toscas asked McCabe about the Weiner laptop. Meanwhile, Barrett started asking the FBI questions about his next story, based on allegations that McCabe had told FBI agents not to pursue an investigation of the Clinton Foundation (a separate matter based on Republican fantasies of a pay-to-play scheme involving donations by foreign governments to the Clinton charity). In fact, the Justice Department had given instructions to the FBI in February not to pursue any further action without any incriminating evidence because of the upcoming election. Some agents in Brooklyn had tried to do an end-run and revive the case, and in August 2016 Principal Associate Attorney General Matthew Axelrod had instructed McCabe to tell the agents to stand down, which, after voicing some objections, McCabe had done. But to Barrett the story was a perfect fit for the “false narrative” he and his unnamed sources were bent on spinning about McCabe.”
With a growing cascade of unwarranted insinuations against his ethics, McCabe also had to deal with the Weiner laptop. On Wednesday, October 26 the agents in Washington and New York had discussed the matter and reviewed the facts, which were nothing more than that as many as 675,000 emails from Abedin’s account were on the laptop. All agreed that a warrant was required to review them. That evening McCabe decided that they needed to re-open the case, no doubt to avoid yet another story by Barrett. No one believed that searching the emails would result in any evidence of a crime.”
Again the unwarranted insinuations were all complements of Devlin “there were no anti Clinton FBI leakers no anti Clinton FBI leakers at all” Barrett.
Honestly Barrett’s attenuated Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon guilt by association story doesn’t even pass the laugh test. Schoenberg is rightly skeptical anyone would actually have such a memory, but presuming it were true, it’s not clear what Barrett’s mother’s story shows. Evidently his mother was someone from a small town who tried to run for office once in her life and fell short. It’s plausible that such a person would years later meet one of her very few donors and feel as if she’d let him down-doesn’t mean she feels so indebted she’d give him her kidney or commit felonies for him.
But even if this really happened-rather than Barrett’s creative fiction version of an Aesop’s Fable-it bears scant resemblance to the fantasies about the McCabes in 2016. Political corruption-pay for play-isn’t usually based on mere gratitude-a few dollars for a lost campaign. It’s usually from someone who’s in office who has something to gain by continuing to please deep pocketed donors.
FN: Ie the danger isn’t from donors of a losing but winning campaign…
“Early the next morning, on October 27, McCabe and Lisa Page, the FBI attorney assigned to assist him, sent out emails calling a 10:00 am meeting of the Midyear Team with Director Comey. McCabe was not in the office and had to call in to the meeting. Before anything of substance could be discussed, however, FBI General Counsel Jim Baker stopped the meeting to ask whether McCabe should be recused and removed from the call “out of an abundance of caution” because of the very public allegations being leveled in Barrett’s articles. Both McCabe and Page were then kicked out of the meeting that they had convened!”
“This was a fateful decision. As anyone who has worked on a team knows, when a few key players get sidelined, the team can become unbalanced. That is precisely what happened to the Midyear team without McCabe and Page. After Comey was briefed on the Weiner laptop, he quickly gave the go-ahead to seek a search warrant, and immediately turned to what was for him the more pressing issue, what to tell Congress. We’ve all heard Comey relay his explanation for that further step, but hardly a word has been said about the initial decision to seek a search warrant, which was the decision setting the ball in motion.”
That Lisa Page wanted to be in the meeting and to discuss whether or not they should seek a search warrant is clear from the text messages she sent to Peter Strzok later that day: “I obviously don’t have to tell you how completely INFURIATED I am with Jim [Baker] right now. . . Please, let’s figure out what it is we HAVE first. What if we can’t make out PC [probable cause]? Then we have no further investigate step.”
FN: Schoenberg then goes on to skewer Comey again on his explanation that he had to do the Letter as the tranche might have included Hillary’s GOLDEN EMAILS.
See Chapter B for more. It underscores the sense in which despite Comey’s concerns about Trump he-like most of GOPland in 2016-was obsessed with the GOLDEN EMAILS.
End FN
This was indeed a fateful decision. We looked at this in Chapter Why the Comey Letter and I’d argued that even if Baker was the one who first raised it that doesn’t mean that Comey hadn’t tasked him with raising it before the meeting. But it couldn’t have been a more fateful decision as McCabe didn’t support the Comey Letter. But it’s clear that by then Comey was already dug in on doing it by hook or by crook.
So Barrett’s reporting unwarranted insinuations against McCabe were what gave the pretext to kick him out of the meeting and eliminate any opposition to the Comey Letter.
The more you learn, the more Barrett’s Savvy insistence there were no rogue FBI agents leaking to take down Hillary Clinton sounds like Charles Manson insisting that serial killing is an Urban Legend that practically never happens.
Bottomline: The 2018 revelation covered in this chapter that Devin Nunes was already aware of the emails a month before the Comey Letter revolutionizes our understanding of this orchestrated October Surprise. While Comey claims it was a choice between “reveal and conceal” in point of fact the emails had already been revealed to the GOP a month earlier. Indeed, you might almost wonder if the Comey Letter wasn’t the crucial moment as the GOP Congress was already aware of the information. But it was crucial as the GOP Congress needed Comey to make it public-it was Comey’s alleged credibility that made it so effective. Then too, as we’ve discussed in chapter Why the Comey Letter it wouldn’t have had such a decisive effect a month earlier. So the GOP Congress held this information close to the breast for a month while the GOP leaning agents over in the FBI figured out how to back Comey into the Comey Letter.
Again in politics they call it the October Surprise not the September Surprise for a reason.
Ergo the theme of this chapter was that as Devlin Barrett claims-pretends-to believe there were no leaks he should Speak to Devin Nunes
Although maybe he has-at a minimum they both probably spoke to the same “rogue” anti Clinton FBI agents… The ones Barrett claims never leaked to anyone-a claim that doesn’t come close to passing t