Thread by @usacsmret

Forgetting Hanssen scandal's failures: FBI saw agent's affair as security risk but took little action thehill.com/opinion/nation…

To understand just how dysfunctional the FBI was under fired Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, consider how it dealt with allegations that its lead agent in the Russia probe was having an extramarital affair that could compromise his work.

Priestap supervised two of the most controversial cases in the past decade — the Hillary Clinton email scandal and the Trump-Russia collusion allegations.
As such, he was the direct boss of Peter Strzok, the Trump-hating agent who led both investigations.

The FBI had informed Congress that Strzok was having an extramarital affair with Lisa Page, the counsel to McCabe, while the Russia case was ongoing. And it was the couple’s now-infamous anti-Trump text messages that gave rise to questions of political bias afflicting the FBI.

Last year, House investigators got the chance to question Priestap, and they asked about the importance of “personnel security” and “making sure that your employees do not do things that make them vulnerable” to a foreign power.

Priestap’s answer was clear and concise. “I’d argue it’s very important for all FBI personnel, very important for all United States intelligence community personnel. And it’s especially important for FBI counterintelligence personnel,”

He was pressed to describe the specific activities that would make an agent vulnerable to an enemy’s spy tradecraft.
“A whole variety of things,” he answered. “Drug abuse, alcohol abuse, being in difficult financial straits, affairs, if you’re married, extramarital affairs.”

Later he added: “A variety of personal behaviors could make somebody more susceptible or vulnerable to foreign recruitment than other behaviors.
“And that is made known to FBI employees?” he was asked.
“Absolutely,”

“I also spoke to both Pete and Lisa about it,” Priestap added. “I felt I owed it to them. Lisa did not report to me but I felt that they ought to be aware of what was being said.”

But before reading Priestap’s words, it’s essential to note that he considered an extramarital affair a security risk, yet treated his interactions with the two FBI agents as a courtesy notification rather than confronting them to see if it was true.

“I didn’t ask them if it is true, but they needed to know that that impression was out there,” Priestap explained. “And I don’t remember my exact words. But what I was trying to communicate is, ‘This better not interfere with things,’ if you know what I mean.

“No,” Priestap answered. “Because, again, I didn’t know for certain it was going on and I didn’t ask them whether it was going on. And I also felt, to a comment earlier, that they knew darn well that if that was going on, that potentially makes them vulnerable.”

Fear of being viewed as a “morality policeman” kept the FBI’s top counterintelligence official from determining if two employees, one an agent, the other a lawyer, and both handling some of the most sensitive counterintelligence cases in recent FBI history were having an affair.

This harkens back to FBI failures two decades earlier when bureau executives failed to confront suspicions about then-counterintelligence agent Robert Hanssen, whose two decades of spying for Russia was among the worst betrayals in U.S. intelligence history.

The after-action investigations in the Hanssen scandal in 2001 and 2002 determined that the FBI suffered from a culture of “lax personnel and information security” which left agents reluctant to question their own colleagues about behavior that might be risky or detrimental.

The FBI, then under the leadership of Director Robert Mueller (who, of course, is now the Trump-Russia special counsel), vowed sweeping reforms to aggressively monitor agents, especially in counterintelligence

The countermeasures ranged from routine polygraphs to creation of a special internal unit looking for moles and risky behavior.
Priestap’s testimony suggests the fervor of those reforms, if they ever existed, had waned by 2016, when the Page-Strzok allegations surfaced.