Tag Archives: IG Report

John Durham’s Investigators ‘Do Not Agree’ with DOJ IG’s Findings on Origin of Russia Probe

By Tobias Hoonhout

December 9, 2019 2:52 PM

U.S. Attorney John Durham (United States Attorney’s Office, District of Connecticut/Wikimedia)

U.S. Attorney John Durham issued a rare statement in the wake of the release of DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s Monday report, stating that his office does “not agree with” the report’s conclusions regarding the origins of the FBI’s 2016 Russia probe.

“I have the utmost respect for the mission of the Office of Inspector General and the comprehensive work that went into the report prepared by Mr. Horowitz and his staff,” Durham’s statement reads. “However, our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department.”

“Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.  Based on the evidence collected to date, and 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’s statement concludes.

Horwitz’s report, released Monday, ascertained that the FBI had an “authorized purpose” for opening its investigation – contradicting President Trump and his allies, who routinely cast the entire investigation as a partisan “witch hunt” – but also found “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the FBI’s FISA application to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Durham’s statement, however, challenges the report’s assertion that the FBI was acting properly in opening its investigation because it received information from a “Friendly Foreign Government” (FFG) that former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos received dirt on Hillary Clinton from Russia.

“Given the low threshold for predication in the AG Guidelines and the DIOG, we concluded that the FFG information, provided by a government the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) deems trustworthy, and describing a first-hand account from an FFG employee of a conversation with Papadopoulos, was sufficient to predicate the investigation,” the report states. “This information provided the FBI with an articulable factual basis that, if true, reasonably indicated activity constituting either a federal crime or a threat to national security, or both, may have occurred or may be occurring.” Stay Updated with NR Daily

NR’s afternoon roundup of the day’s best commentary & must-read analysis.

It’s unclear which government the report is referencing, but in May 2016 former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer sent a memo to the FBI in which he relayed Papadopoulos’s claim that Russian intelligence planned to release damaging information about Hillary Clinton ahead of the election, a claim that Papadopoulos heard from Maltese academic and alleged Russian asset Joseph Mifsud, who had met previously with Papadopoulos.

Papadopoulos was found guilty of lying to Robert Mueller’s investigators about contacts he had with Mifsud, although Downer said that his memo did not indicate that Papadopoulos or anyone else on the Trump campaign had coordinated with Russia to obtain the information.

“There was no suggestion — [neither] from Papadopoulos nor in the record of the meeting that we sent back to Canberra — there was no suggestion that there was collusion between Donald Trump or Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russians,” Downer said.

Papadopoulos has publicly speculated that Downer was working with Joseph Mifsud — a Maltese academic who reached out to him claiming to have access to damaging information about Clinton — to entrap him and damage the Trump campaign.

Durham, the Connecticut U.S. attorney appointed by attorney general William P. Barr to lead a DOJ probe into the origins of the Russia investigation, spoke to Downer last month as part of the probe, which has been upgraded to a criminal inquiry. Comments

In October, Barr defended Durham and the probe after criticism from Democratic lawmakers.

“He’s a 35-year veteran of the department, great reputation for non-partisanship. He was selected by two Democratic attorney generals to do sensitive investigations for them,” Barr said of Durham, the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut. “He’s a by-the-book kind of guy. He’s thorough and fair, and I’m confident he’s going to get to the bottom of things.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/john-durhams-investigators-do-not-agree-with-doj-igs-findings-on-origin-of-russia-probe/



TiLTNews Network

DOJ IG Report Slams Bruce Ohr’s Failure To Report Repeated Interactions With Steele

DOJ IG Report Slams Bruce Ohr’s Failure To Report Repeated Interactions With Steele

December 9, 2019 By Tristan Justice

The long-anticipated report from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz released Monday criticized department attorney Bruce Ohr at length for failing to report repeated contacts with former British spy Christopher Steele.

Steele, the author of the debunked Steele dossier that was used to justify a federal investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign, met with Ohr 12 times after Steele was terminated as a confidential human source by the bureau. As the report notes, Ohr failed to report the repeated interactions with Steele to his DOJ supervisors, depriving the department of the opportunity to request that Ohr halt communication with the fired informant. Instead, Ohr continued to feed Steele’s information to the department and FBI, circumventing Steele’s termination as a reliable source.

According to the report, Ohr acknowledged to the DOJ that it was because of the possibility he would be told to stop these meetings with Steele that he chose not to report them to his direct supervisors.

While Horowitz stopped short of recommending Ohr for a criminal referral, the DOJ inspector general spent more than 36 pages of the report singling out the bureaucrat for circumventing his supervisors and referred Ohr to the Office of Professional Responsibility. Horowitz also referred Ohr’s actions to his supervisors in the criminal justice division, leaving the door open to future criminal prosecution.

“We found that, while no Department or ODAG policy specifically prohibited Ohr’s activities, Ohr was clearly cognizant of his responsibility to inform his supervisors of his interactions with Steele, the FBI, and State Department,” the report states. “We are referring our finding to the Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility for any action it deems appropriate. We are also providing our finding to Ohr’s current supervisors in CRM for any action they deem appropriate.” Tristan Justice is a staff writer at The Federalist focusing on the 2020 presidential campaigns. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Bruce OhrChristopher SteelecollusionDOJFBIFISAFISA abuseMichael HorowitzRussiaRussia collusionRussiagateRussian collusionSpygateSteele Dossier

TiLTNews Network

HERE IT IS! From the Inspector General’s Office!

Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation

REDACTED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE Office of the Inspector General U.S. Department of Justice OVERSIGHT* INTEGRITY * GUIDANCE Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation

https://www.justice.gov/storage/120919-examination.pdf

TiLTNews Network

Inspector General Ramps Up Investigations of FBI Employees

December 5, 2019 Updated: December 5, 2019 

Open investigations of FBI employees by the Justice Department’s Inspector General (IG) have about doubled in recent years and, as far as available records go, there have never been so many investigations of this kind.

The Office of IG Michael Horowitz had 104 “open criminal or administrative investigations of alleged misconduct related to FBI employees” as of Sept. 30, according to its latest semi-annual report to Congress (pdf).

The number fell from 112 open investigations just six months earlier, but still fit into a heightened trend. In fiscal 2018, the IG reported 84 and 93 open investigations, respectively. In the decade before that, the average was a bit under 51.

It’s not clear what’s behind the increase.

In the past few years, the IG has worked on a number of high-profile investigations, including one into former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for a self-serving media leak and another into former FBI Director James Comey for disclosure of sensitive information.

In June 2018, the IG released a report on his review of the investigation into the purported mishandling of classified information by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. While the report criticized several FBI officials involved in the probe for political bias, it concluded that “we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed.”

Anticipated Report

Horowitz is expected to release on Dec. 9 his review of FBI actions to obtain a spying warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page and the counterintelligence probe into several associates of Donald Trump. The warrant was in large part based on the Steele dossier, a collection of unsubstantiated claims about collusion between Russia and the campaign of then-candidate Trump.

The warrant was taken out by the bureau in the fall of 2016, was renewed several times, and remained active well into 2017.

The FBI officially opened a counterintelligence investigation into claimed Russian ties of four Trump associates on July 31, 2016. In 2017, the investigation was taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller, whose appointment was prompted by Comey’s release of sensitive information about his personal conversations with the newly elected President Trump.

Mueller released his final report in April, saying the investigation didn’t establish any collusion between Trump or his associates and Russian interference with the 2016 election.

In October, Page sued the Justice Department, saying his requests to review a draft of the IG report and other related records haven’t been met.

He also alleged that the department violated his privacy rights by sending copies of the surveillance warrant application to The New York Times before presenting him an opportunity to review the documents.

Former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith was reportedly referred for criminal prosecution by Horowitz for allegedly altering an email connected to the Page warrant.

Clinesmith was revealed by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) as the “FBI Attorney 2” mentioned 56 times in the IG’s Clinton probe report.

On Nov. 22, 2016, Clinesmith’s supervisor, Sally Moyer, asked him in a message whether he’d rethought his “commitment to the Trump administration,” to which he replied, “[Expletive] no. Viva le resistance,” according to the report, which identified them as “FBI Attorney 1” and “FBI Attorney 2.”

Based on those designations, Clinesmith also lamented Trump’s win the day after the election, writing to another employee that he was “devastated” and couldn’t wait to “leave today and just shut off the world for the next four days.”

“Plus, my [expletive] name is all over the legal documents investigating his [Trump’s] staff,” he also wrote.

Source: Inspector General Ramps Up Investigations of FBI Employees

TiLTNews Network