Newly obtained documents confirm that James Comey’s
FBI was running a secret and corrupt counterintelligence operation
against the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016 and repeatedly
deceiving the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) thereafter
in order to wiretap a Trump campaign associate.
The disclosure was
the result of a federal lawsuit and a year of litigation. Despite
efforts by FBI Director Christopher Wray to obstruct, a federal court
issued an order that forced the FBI and Department of Justice to produce
the records known as “302 reports.” They are a summary of interviews
FBI agents conducted with Bruce Ohr, a top DOJ official.
These 302s show that the FBI and DOJ were warned repeatedly by Ohr that ex-British spy Christopher Steele was virulently biased against the target of their investigation, Trump.
That
bias tainted the credibility of the “dossier” Steele composed and upon
which officials in the Obama administration relied when they officially
launched their counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016. The
“dossier” was also the basis for the surveillance warrant against former
Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.
The FBI and DOJ ignored the
warnings of bias and actively concealed it from the FISC. They never
advised the judges that the information contained in the “dossier” was
“unverified.”
They hid from the judges that it was all funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
The
court was never told that Ohr’s wife helped cultivate some of the
researched used against Trump. Having fired Steele for leaking to the
media and lying about it, the FBI and DOJ represented to the judge that
Steele was “reliable” when they knew he was not. They continued to rely
on him months after his termination.
An apparent fraud was
perpetrated on the court not once, but four times in successive warrants
through June of 2017. These are dishonest, if not felonious acts.
Secret Meetings
On July 5, 2016, Comey stood before television cameras and microphones at a nationally watched news conference.
By
mangling the law and contorting the facts, he announced that he was
exonerating Hillary Clinton of any crimes for her mishandling of
thousands of classified documents.
At
roughly the same time, some 3,660 miles away from Washington, Comey’s
FBI was meeting in a London building with Steele who conveyed the
contents of his initial “dossier” memo dated June 20, 2016, with agent
Michael Gaeta. When the FBI agent read the document, he was stunned and
remarked, “I have to report this to headquarters.” Thus, on the same
day, Comey cleared Clinton, the witch hunt against Trump began in
earnest.
On July 30 Steele met with Ohr at 9 a.m. at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington.
Steele shared his “dossier” but added that the FBI already had it in its possession.
Immediately
thereafter, Ohr convened a meeting with FBI Deputy Director Andrew
McCabe and the FBI lawyer who worked for him directly, Lisa Page.
The 302 reports corroborate Ohr’s congressional testimony behind closed doors that was made public in February of this year.
He
told lawmakers that he specifically warned McCabe and Page that the
information in the “dossier” was highly dubious and driven by a biased
author who despised Trump.
He also advised that it was
commissioned by Fusion GPS where his wife worked because, “I wanted the
FBI to be aware of any possible bias.”
Page 125 of Ohr’s
congressional transcript is especially revealing. “I told them that
Steele was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected,” he stated.
He
pointedly informed McCabe and Page that Trump’s political rival, the
Clinton campaign, was financially underwriting the “dossier,” which
would call into question its veracity because the campaign had a motive
to distort or fabricate in order to damage its opponent.
Ohr testified that he cautioned the FBI, “These guys were hired by somebody relating to –who’s related to the Clinton campaign.”
In
truth, the funding wasn’t merely “related” to the campaign, it was the
campaign, along with the DNC. Ohr also disseminated the “dossier” to
Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka at the FBI. But Ohr wasn’t done.
Shortly
after the July 30 breakfast with Steele, Ohr gave the same improbable
intelligence to three prosecutors at the Justice Department during
another meeting.
Two of those individuals, Andrew Weissmann and
Zainab Ahmad, were later hired by Robert Mueller to be a part of his
assembled team of special counsel prosecutors that escalated the
investigation of Trump beyond the FBI and DOJ. They, too, were informed
by Ohr that the Clinton campaign and Democrats had paid for
the “dossier” and that Steele was severely biased against Trump.
Instead
of investigating Clinton and her confederates for conspiring with
foreigners to defraud the U.S. government or violate campaign finance
laws, the FBI used the Clinton-Russian “dossier” to target Trump despite
a dearth of evidence that any of it was true.
Information Laundering Scheme
Even
though Steele was fired by the FBI as a confidential informant, the new
302 reports confirm that Comey’s FBI kept returning him as a source.
By using Ohr as a conduit, they continued to receive information from
Steele.
This continued even after Trump was elected and
inaugurated as president. Indeed, Steele kept feeding the bureau his
phony information through May of 2017.
To circumvent the rules
they were breaking, the FBI set up an “information laundering scheme.”
Steele would feed information to Ohr, who would pass it to his “handler”
Joe Pienka, who would feed it to his partner Peter Strzok, who would
give it to Andrew McCabe, who would deliver it to Comey.
Similar
to a “money-laundering scheme,” the complex transfer cleansed the dirty
information to obscure the original source –Steele. But the
information, of course, was largely fabricated and/or the product of
Russian disinformation.
It
should be remembered that a counterintelligence investigation is
designed to collect evidence of foreign threats to U.S. national
security. Normally, the president is the beneficiary of such
information.
Here, Comey’s FBI was abusing its counterintelligence
authority by using it against Trump. Moreover, Comey appears to have
been lying to the president about it.
In
early 2017, he kept assuring Trump he was not being investigated. These
documents show that he obviously was, well into his presidency. And
yet, the FBI had no evidence that corroborated any of Steele’s
“collusion” allegations.
As John Solomon of the Hill has reported,
the FBI developed a “spread-sheet like document” that was 90 percent
empty of any proof. This did not deter them. They continued to
investigate Trump. And when Comey was fired, he helped engineer part two
of the witch hunt --the special counsel investigation.
