Inspector General Michael Horowitz's long-awaited report this week on
FBI and Justice Department surveillance abuses does not provide the
name of an unidentified FBI supervisory special agent (SSA) who made a
series of apparent oversights in the bureau's so-called "Crossfire
Hurricane" probe into the Trump campaign.
However, a review of
Horowitz's findings leaves little doubt that the unnamed SSA is
Joe
Pientka -- someone who could soon play a prominent role in the ongoing
prosecution of Michael Flynn, as the former Trump national security
adviser fights to overturn his guilty plea on a single charge of making
false statements.
Specifically, Horowitz's report
states that "SSA 1" was one of the FBI agents to interview Flynn at the
White House on Jan. 24, 2017, in a seemingly casual conversation that
would later form the basis for his criminal prosecution.
It was previously reported
that the interviewing agents were Peter Strzok, who was later fired by
the FBI for misconduct and anti-Trump bias, and Pientka, whom Strzok previously identified as his notetaker for the Flynn interview. Flynn's attorney has also mentioned Pientka's role during past court proceedings. Of the two agents, only Strzok is openly named in the Horowitz report, which strongly indicates that the other is Pientka.
"SSA
1," Horowitz's report states, may have helped mislead the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) about material facts concerning
former Trump adviser Carter Page and British ex-spy Christopher Steele,
whose unverified dossier played a central role in the FBI's warrant to
surveil Page.
Page has not been charged with any wrongdoing, even
though the FBI flatly called him a foreign "agent" in its surveillance
warrant application. And former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation,
which concluded earlier this year, found no evidence that the Trump
campaign had engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russians to influence
the 2016 election, despite multiple outreach efforts by Russian actors.
On
Aug. 1, 2016, just after the official inception of the FBI’s
investigation into the Trump campaign, Strzok and Pientka traveled
overseas to meet with the Australian officials who had spoken with Trump
adviser George Papadopoulos in May of that year. The officials had
overhead Papadopoulos mention his now-infamous conversation with Joseph
Mifsud about suggestions of potential Russian leaks of Hillary Clinton’s
emails, apparently touching off what would become the Russia probe.
SSA
1 was given a supervisory role on the Crossfire Hurricane team,
overseeing agents and reporting directly to Strzok. The special agent
created the electronic sub-file to which the Steele reports would be
uploaded and, according to Horowitz, these reports were used to support
the probable cause in the Page FISA applications.
Then, on
Sept. 23, 2016, Yahoo News published an article describing U.S.
government efforts to determine whether Page was in communication with
Kremlin officials. The article seemed to closely track information from
one of Steele’s reports. As a result, one FBI case agent who reported to
SSA 1 believed Steele was the source, according to Horowitz.
SSA
1 apparently thought the same, as his notes from a Sept. 30, 2016,
meeting said: “Control issues -- reports acknowledged in Yahoo
News.” When questioned by Horowitz's office, the agent explained he was
concerned -- but not sure -- that Steele was the Yahoo News source.
The
drafts of the Page FISA application, however, tell a different story.
Horowitz found that until Oct. 14, 2016, drafts state that Steele was
responsible for the leak that led to the Yahoo News article. One draft
specifically states that Steele “was acting on his/her own volition and
has since been admonished by the FBI.”
These assertions, which
could have pointed to political motivations by their source soon before
the 2016 presidential election, were changed to the following: Steele’s
“business associate or the law firm that hired the business associate
likely provided this information to the press.”
Horowitz found no facts to support this assessment.
Former Trump adviser Carter Page was falsely accused of being a "foreign agent" in the FBI's secret surveillance warrant.
And, even after receiving “additional information
about Steele’s media contacts, the Crossfire Hurricane team did not
change the language in any of the three renewal applications regarding
the FBI’s assessment of Steele’s role in the September 23 article,"
Horowitz found.
On Oct. 11, 2016, Steele met with then-State
Department official Jonathan Winer and Deputy Assistant Secretary
Kathleen Kavalec. Steele informed Kavalec that a Russian cyber-hacking
operation targeting the 2016 U.S. elections was paying the culprits from
“the Russian Consulate in Miami.” Kavalec later met with an FBI liaison
and explained to them that Russia did not have a consulate in Miami.
SSA 1 was informed of Steele’s incorrect claim about the Russian
Consulate on Nov. 18, 2016, but the FISA court was never provided this
information, according to the IG report.
Additionally, the agent
was aware of Page’s denials to an FBI confidential human source (CHS)
that he knew Russian officials Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin – officials
that Steele alleged Page had secret meetings with in Moscow in July
2016. In fact, Horowitz found that SSA 1 “knew as of October 17 that
Page denied ever knowing Divyekin."
"This
inconsistency was also not noted during the Woods Procedures on the
subsequent FISA renewal applications, and none of the three later FISA
renewal applications included Page’s denials to the CHS," Horowitz
wrote, referring to the FBI's practice of reverifying facts in its FISA
application before seeking renewals.
SSA 1 also had the
responsibility for “confirming that the Woods File was complete and for
double-checking the factual accuracy review to confirm that the file
contained appropriate documentation for each of the factual assertions
in the FISA application," according to Horowitz.
But Horowitz
found numerous instances “in which factual assertions relied upon in the
first FISA application targeting Carter Page were inaccurate,
incomplete or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon
information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application
was filed."
In particular, the FBI misled the FISC by asserting
that Steele’s prior reporting "has been corroborated and used in
criminal proceedings.” Horowitz's review found there was no
documentation to support this statement; SSA 1 told Horowitz they
“speculated.”
SSA
1 was also aware, according to Horowitz, that Steele had relayed his
information to officials at the State Department, and he had
documentation showing Steele had told the team he provided the reports
to his contacts at the State Department. Despite this, the FISC was
informed that Steele told the FBI he “only provided this information to
the business associate and the FBI.”
After Steele was terminated
as an FBI source for leaking to the media, there was a meeting with
Crossfire Hurricane team members and Justice Department official Bruce
Ohr, whose wife had been hired by Steele employer Fusion GPS. SSA 1 told
Horowitz that Ohr likely left the meeting with the impression that he
should contact the FBI if Steele contacted him; Ohr told Horowitz that
SSA 1 became his initial point of contact when relaying Steele’s
information to the FBI.
Pientka was selected to provide an Aug.
17, 2016 FBI security briefing to the Trump campaign once the FBI was
informed that Flynn would be in attendance. According to Pientka, the
briefing gave him “the opportunity to gain assessment and possibly have
some level of familiarity” with Flynn. He was there to “record” anything
“specific to Russia or anything specific to our investigation.”
Pientka
found the opportunity to interact with Flynn “useful” because he was
able to compare Flynn’s “norms” from the briefing with Flynn’s conduct
at his Jan. 24, 2017, interview. It was this assessment that
purportedly helped lead Pientka to conclude that Flynn was not lying
when questioned about his interactions with the Russians after the
election and his calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
With Strzok's termination from the FBI, Pientka is perhaps the only remaining FBI witness against Flynn.
Horowitz's descriptions of SSA 1's conduct came as U.S. Attorney John Durham announced Monday that he did not "agree" with
some of the inspector general's conclusions, stunning observers while
also highlighting Durham's broader criminal mandate and scope of review.
Durham is focusing on foreign actors as well as the CIA, while Horowitz
concentrated his attention on the Justice Department and FBI.
"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 said in his statement, adding that his
"investigation is not limited to developing information from within
component parts of the Justice Department" and "has included developing
information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and
outside of the U.S."
Pientka is hardly the only bureau employee to
come under scrutiny. Prior to the FBI's warrant application to monitor
Page, the FBI reached out to the CIA and other intelligence agencies for
information on Page, Horowitz discovered. The CIA responded in an
email by telling the FBI that Page had contacts with Russians from 2008
to 2013, but that Page had reported them to the CIA and was serving as a
CIA operational contact and informant on Russian business and
intelligence interests.
An FBI lawyer then doctored the CIA's
email about Page to make it seem as though the agency had said only that
Page was not an active source. And, the FBI included Page's contacts
with Russians in the warrant application as evidence he was a foreign
"agent," without disclosing to the secret surveillance court that Page
was voluntarily working with the CIA concerning those foreign contacts.
For several years, Democrats and analysts at The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN have
repeatedly claimed that key claims in the Clinton-funded anti-Trump
dossier had been corroborated and that the document was not critical to
the FBI's warrant to surveil Page. Horowitz repudiated that claim, with
the FBI's legal counsel even describing the warrant to surveil Page as
"essentially a single source FISA" wholly dependent on the dossier.
Among
the unsubstantiated claims in the dossier: that ex-Trump lawyer Michael
Cohen traveled to Prague to conspire with Russian hackers; that the
Trump campaign was paying hackers working out of a nonexistent Russian
consulate in Miami; that a lurid blackmail tape of Trump existed and
might be in Russian possession; and that Page was bribed with a 19
percent share in a Russian company.
The FBI declined Fox News' request for an on-the-record comment late Friday.
Wilson Miller contributed to this report.