Trump calls ex-FBI leaders 'dirty cops' in wake of damning IG report
Donald Trump calls former FBI leaders ‘dirty cops’ in wake of damning inspector general’s report into eavesdropping warrant on his former campaign aide
- Trump slammed ‘dirty cops’ at FBI who targeted his former campaign aide
- President Trump has directed his ire at an independent inspector general’s office report on the origins of the Russia investigation
- Trump earlier unloaded on the FBI for relying on the Steele dossier for warrants
- IG found ‘significant inaccuracies and omissions’ in FBI surveillance warrants
- However it found the opening of the Russia probe was ‘in compliance with Department and FBI policies’
- Initial probe was opened ‘by consensus’ among top FBI leadership
- Didn’t have corroborating information for warrants on Carter Page
- Cites Golden Showers dossier – saying government not required to ‘ignore’
- However the FBI did not press Chris Steele for information about the actual funding source for his election reporting work
Donald Trump on Thursday slammed the ‘dirty cops’ at the FBI who obtained a surveillance warrant against his then-campaign aide Carter Page during the 2016 presidential contest.
The president took to Twitter to blast the ‘dirty cops’ as he called them – another complaint Trump has hurled at the bureau since Monday’s report on the origins of the Russia investigation was released.
His target appeared to be James Comey, the FBI director he fired, as he retweeted a criticism of Comey with the ‘dirty cops’ moniker.
Donald Trump slammed the ‘dirty cops’ at the FBI who obtained a surveillance warrant against his then-campaign aide Carter Page
Trump’s ire appeared to be directed at James Comey, the FBI director he fired
Earlier this week President Trump bemoaned that a group of rogue FBI officials had tried to engineer an ‘overthrow’ when they obtained a series of surveillance warrants against Page, one of his 2016 campaign advisers.
The agency ignored warnings that an anti-Trump research dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele was flawed—and its author biased—when agents used the material to justify warrants targeting Page, who they thought might be a Russian asset.
That assessment came from a blockbuster issued by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, spelling out steps the feds failed to take when they learned Steele’s work was funded by the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
‘This was an overthrow of government. This was an attempted overthrow and a lot of people were in on it, and they got caught,’ Trump told reporters in the hour after the report’s public release. ‘They got caught red-handed.’
Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz has released his report on the opening of the ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ Russia probe
‘They fabricated evidence and they lied to the courts,’ he claimed, calling the report’s conclusions ‘an incredible thing that happened and we’re lucky we caught them.’
Trump seemed to take credit for firing Comey in 2017, suggesting that he had quelled an illegal conspiracy by putting its leader out of commission.
Trump warned about ‘what they would have done if I didn’t make a certain move, a certain move that was a very important move because it would have been even worse if that’s possible. ‘And it might have been able to succeed.’
The FBI’s decision to target Page with spying authorized by a secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court was made and reinforced by the FBI’s most senior leaders, Horowitz wrote.
‘[T]he FBI’s decision to rely upon Steele’s election reporting to help establish probable cause that Page was an agent of Russia was a judgment reached initially by the case agents on the Crossfire Hurricane team,’ he explained, referring to the name of the operation.
‘We further determined that FBI officials at every level concurred with this judgment, from the … attorneys assigned to the investigation to senior [counterintelligence] officials, then General Counsel James Baker, then Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and then Director James Comey.’
President Trump called the FBI’s Russia probe, which the IG acknowledged was properly authorized and not due to bias, was an ‘attempted overthrow’
The report contains a lengthy section on former British intelligence officier Christopher Steele
Even after the senior Justice Department official in charge of national security cautioned that Steele’s work product might be a political hit job aimed at Trump, Comey and his chain of command never re-evaluated their position, Horowitz wrote.
‘FBI leadership supported relying on Steele’s reporting to seek a FISA order on Page after being advised of, and giving consideration to, concerns expressed by Stuart Evans, then NSD’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General with oversight responsibility over [intelligence], that Steele may have been hired by someone associated with presidential candidate Clinton or the DNC.’
As FBI officials learned more and more about Steele, his ‘reliability,’ and his funding, Horowitz wrote, they never took a fresh look at what they were submitting to FISA judges.
‘[T]he FBI failed to reassess the Steele reporting relied upon in the FISA applications … [and] did not press Steele for information about the actual funding source for his election reporting work,’ the report says.
At an event Monday about education reform, the president called the episode ‘a disgrace.’
‘It’s incredible, far worse than what I ever thought possible,’ he said, referring to ‘concocted’ FISA warrant applications.
‘It’s an embarrassment to our country. It’s dishonest. It’s everything that a lot of people thought it would be, except much worse.’
IG report reveals Ivanka Trump has had a long term friendship with dossier author Christopher Steele
Ivanka Trump and Christopher Steele had a longstanding friendship that started a decade before the former British spy authored the infamous dossier, according to the Inspector General’s report.
The report references Steele and Trump’s meetings and correspondence over the years.
But Steele cited his past cordial relationship with Trump as reason to show that he is not biased against the Trump family, as thought by Republicans after the released of his dossier.
Ivanka Trump has had a longterm friendship with dossier author Christopher Steele
‘If anything he was ‘favorably predisposed’ towards the Trump family before he began his research,’ the IG report reads, inciting a phrase Steele used to describe his view of the Trumps.
Steele told investigators he met with ‘a Trump family member at Trump Tower and ‘been friendly’ with [the family member] for some years.’
He mentioned that he gifted the individual a ‘family tartan,’ and said any suggestion that he was biased against the Trumps was ‘ridiculous.’
A tartan is a patterned cloth usually with criss-crossed bands in multiple colors – and historically each clan or family in Scotland would have a particular tartan pattern associated with them and would be worn in their kilts.
Although the report does not include the name of the individual, ABC News revealed that the individual is Ivanka, who Steele met at a dinner party in 2007.
Steele and the president’s eldest daughter began their correspondence following their meeting, talking about working together in the future, a source indicated.
They stayed in touch over email for several years. In one email the two talked about meeting up near Trump Tower and in another 2008 exchange they discussed going out for dinner together in New York City, a few blocks away from the tower.
At the time of those email chains, Ivanka was working as the executive vice president of the Trump Organization and she and Steele discussed a range of services his company could offer Trump’s foreign real estate projects.
The two, however, never worked together.
Steele authored a 2016 dossier alleging links between the Trump campaign and Russia, which ultimately led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the claims.
The dossier also detailed embarrassing incidents involving Donald Trump before he took office.
In one instance, it alleges that Trump ‘hated’ then-President Barack Obama so much that when he stayed in the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow in 2013 he paid ‘a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ show in front of him’ to defile the bed used by the Obamas on their visit to Russia.
Critics of Steele, mainly Republicans, argue that the former MI6 officer who founded the London-based intelligence firm Orbis was biased against Trump and set out to produce a negative report on the then-presidential candidate.
Steele was hired by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm, in 2016 to look into then-candidate Trump and his potential ties to Russia.
Trump has called the dossier ‘phony’ and depicted Steele as a ‘dopey’ ‘failed spy.’
On Twitter he referred to the former intelligence official as ‘Steele of fraudulent Dossier fame,’ and claims he is ‘tied’ to Hillary Clinton – his 2016 Democratic rival.
DOJ officials traveled to London to interview Steele in June.
The FBI obtained surveillance warrants on Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor
Pictured: (l-r) Peter Fritsch and Glenn Simpson, Founders, Fusion GPS; Co-Authors, Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump appear on Meet the Press’ in Washington, D.C., Sunday, November 24, 2019
Comey hit back at the president with his own op-ed Monday.
‘The president said the FBI’s actions were ‘treason.’ The current attorney general even slimed his own organization by supporting Trump’s claims, asserting there had been ‘spying’ on the campaign. Crimes had been committed, the Trump crowd said, and a whole bunch of former FBI leaders, including me, were likely going to jail,’ Comey wrote.
‘On Monday, we learned from a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, that the allegation of a criminal conspiracy was nonsense. There was no illegal wiretapping, there were no informants inserted into the campaign, there was no ‘spying’ on the Trump campaign.’
‘Although it took two years, the truth is finally out,’ wrote Comey, whose firing Trump alluded to in comments Monday as a decision that helped head off a coup.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement: ‘The shocking report from the DOJ Inspector General shows an out-of-control FBI under President Obama and former Director Jim Comey. The report makes clear that the phony Steele Dossier was ‘central and essential’ for the FBI to secure wiretaps from the FISA Court to spy on the Trump campaign,’ she said.
‘But the FBI repeatedly lied to the FISA Court to make Steele seem credible and to hide information showing that the Dossier was false. The Dossier was bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee – but that fact was hidden from the FISA Court. Astoundingly, when evidence was repeatedly uncovered showing no wrongdoing by candidate Trump, that also was hidden from the FISA Court,’ Grisham continued.
‘On top of all that, one FBI lawyer altered an email in an effort to continue and extend the wiretapping – and he has been referred for criminal prosecution. All of this shows a repeated effort to mislead the FISA Court long after the FBI was aware the ‘Dossier’ was false, phony and could not be used justify spying on the Trump Campaign. The American people should be outraged and terrified by this abuse of power. This should never happen to another presidential candidate or any American ever again.”
Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is now a communications adviser helping Trump parry Democrats’ attempts to impeach him, sounded an alarm about FISA abuses.
‘I think the American people really should be terrified that this could happen to you, when we’re supposed to live in a society of integrity and honesty,’ Bondi said.
Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway, who was the president’s campaign manager in the closing months of the 2016 campaign, suggested that if the FBI had been operating above-board, it should have alerted the campaign to the possibility that it had a Russian spy in its midst.
‘Why no defensive briefing?’ she asked Monday, using the common term for that kind of information exchange with law enforcement.
‘You can’t blame people for feeling that it was unfair,’ Conway said, ‘and that the fix was in.’
Horowitz’s investigation did not find political bias was a factor in launching Operation Crossfire Hurricane and other parallel probes.
But a different and darker interpretation, that Trump’s enemies in federal law enforcement tried to railroad him, was the subject of a stinging dissent from Attorney General Bill Barr on Monday.
‘The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,’ Barr wrote in a blistering statement.
‘It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory. Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump’s administration,’ he continued.
‘In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source. The Inspector General found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory. While most of the misconduct identified by the Inspector General was committed in 2016 and 2017 by a small group of now-former FBI officials, the malfeasance and misfeasance detailed in the Inspector General’s report reflects a clear abuse of the FISA process,’ said Barr.
Barr concluded that when it comes to personnel identified in the report, ‘the Department will follow all appropriate processes and procedures, including as to any potential disciplinary action.’
U.S. Attorney John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut who is helming a more expansive criminal probe at Barr’s direction, issued his own stinging dissent Monday.
Durham said he parts ways with Horowitz on the question of whether Crossfire Hurricane was justified in the first place
‘While our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened,’ Durham said in a statement.
Trump said he was eagerly awaiting Durham’s report.
‘It’s got its own information,’ he said, ‘which is this information, plus, plus, plus.’
Horowitz reports that the FBI agent responsible for handling Steele and his dossier found it ‘obvious … that the request for the research was politically motivated.’
But he acknowledged that fears of political bias ‘did not require the FBI, under either DOJ or FBI policy, to ignore his reporting.’
‘The FBI regularly receives information from individuals with potentially significant biases and motivations, including drug traffickers, convicted felons, and even terrorists. The FBI is not required to set aside such information; rather, FBI policy requires that it critically assess the information.’
The IG’s report finds ‘significant inaccuracies and omissions’ in FBI surveillance warrants at the start of the Russia probe – but uncovered no evidence of political bias by the agents who carried it out.
The deep-dive look at the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation found that it was not initial authorized by agents who were hostile to the president or acting out of bias.
The initial probe was authorized by career FBI lawyer Bill Prestap in consultation with top FBI officials. ‘We concluded that Priestap’s exercise of discretion in opening the investigation was in compliance with Department and FBI policies, and we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced his decision,’ according to the IG.
‘We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions to open the four individual investigations’ IG Michael Horowitz concluded.
However the IG did find ‘significant inaccuracies and omissions’ in the applications to get surveillance warrants on former Trump foreign policy advisor Carter page.
What was lacking was information that would corroborate information contained in the infamous Golden Showers Dossier authored by ex British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
‘We found that the FBI did not have information corroborating the specific allegations against Carter Page in Steele’s reporting when it relied upon his reports in the first FISA application or subsequent renewal applications,’ the IG found.
The IG defended the use of information provided by Steele, noting that the government often relies on information from people who may have a political bias or even from terrorists during the course of investigations.
The fact that Steele was conducting paid opposition research on behalf of Fusion GPS ‘did not require the FBI, under either DOJ or FBI policy, to ignore his reporting,’ the report notes.
‘However, as we describe later, as the FBI obtained additional information raising significant questions about the reliability of the Steele election reporting, the FBI failed to reassess the Steele reporting relied upon in the FISA applications, and did not fully advise [appropriate] officials. We also found that the FBI did not aggressively seek to obtain certain potentially important information from Steele. For example, the FBI did not press Steele for information about the actual funding source for his election reporting work,’ the IG report says.
The report does note the perceived ‘hostility’ to candidate Trump by former FBI agents Peter Strzrok and Lisa Page, who Trump now regularly attacks as the ‘FBI lovers.’
However the IG found that Strzok ‘was not the sole, or even the highest-level, decision maker as to any of those matters’ such as approving the investigation.
When Priestap ultimately decided to open the probe, it was done ‘by consensus after multiple days of discussions and meetings that included Strzok and other leadership in CD, the FBI Deputy Director, the FBI General Counsel, and a FBI Deputy General Counsel’ the IG found.
The report finds that the FBI began using relatively unobtrusive methods to obtain information as the probe began.
Then, those methods became more intrusive, as when it used confidential human sources (‘CHGs’) ‘to interact and consensually record multiple conversations with Page and [Trump foreign policy advisor George] Papadopoulos, both before and after they were working for the Trump campaign, as well as on one occasion with a high-level Trump campaign official who was not a subject of the investigation,’ the report says.
It does not identify the high-level Trump campaign official who was recorded. The IG finds it ‘concerning’ that the FBI wasn’t required by department policy to ‘consult’ with a Justice Department official before conducting confidential human surveillance operations ‘involving advisors to a major party candidate’s presidential campaign.’
Although it doesn’t fault the Bureau for this, it provides a forward-looking ‘recommendation’ on the issue.
The report provides an explanation to a question that Republican lawmakers raised at an impeachment hearing on Monday: why the FBI did not provide Trump with a ‘defensive’ briefing sometimes provided to targets of a crime.
Democrats got one after the hack of DNC servers that investigators quickly traced to Russia.
Trump, however, didn’t. The IG cites the FBI’s Priestap as explaining the reasoning.
‘While the Counterintelligence Division does regularly provide defensive briefings to U.S. government officials or possible soon to be officials, in my experience, we do this when there is no indication, whatsoever, that the person to whom we would brief could be working with the relevant foreign adversary,’ he explained. In other words, ‘when there is no indication that the specific U.S. person could be working with the adversary.’
In the case of Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos, ‘We also had no indication, whatsoever, that the person affiliated with the Trump campaign had rejected the alleged offer from the Russians.’
According to Priestap, ‘Had we provided a defensive briefing to someone on the Trump campaign, we would have alerted the campaign to what we were looking into, and, if someone on the campaign was engaged with the Russians, he/she would very likely change his/her tactics and/or otherwise seek to cover-up his/her activities, thereby preventing us from finding the truth.’
In the case of Page, FBI agents had been considering opening a counterintelligence investigation on him for years. Counter-intelligence agents ‘believed that Carter Page was ‘passed’ from Intelligence Officer 1 to a successor Russian intelligence officer {Intelligence Officer 2) in 2013 and that Page would continue to be introduced to other Russian intelligence officers in the future,’ according to the report.
In 2015, three Russians were indicted in federal court in Manhattan for trying to recruit an asset.
‘The indictment referenced Intelligence Officer 2’s attempts to recruit ‘Male-1′ as an asset for gathering intelligence on behalf of Russia,’ according to the report. Page would tell counter-intelligence agents the following years tha the was ‘Male-1,’ and that ‘he had identified himself as Male-1 to a Russian Minister and various Russian officials at a United Nations event in ‘the spirit of openness.”
The investigation began in secret during Trump´s 2016 presidential run and was ultimately taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller.
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