Thread by @DawsonSField

The Justice Department report on FBI Management of Confidential Human Sources is out. This is not the specific investigation into use of Christopher Steele, but a look at the management process that should have prevented some of the Steele problems.

oig.justice.gov/reports/2019/a…

This looks like it is mostly about policy compliance issues. BUT those policies in usage of CHS were all created to prevent mistakes & misuse of sources by the FBI.
Not unusually, the FBI did not comply with the policies designed to prevent repeating mistakes of the past.

I don't expect to find anything earth shattering in here, hopefully some revealing footnotes!
But this will serve as the groundwork to prove that the agents relying upon Steele & other sources only did so because they did not properly vet him or his claims. It is a foundation...

It allows the finding that the CHS errors & mismanagement allowed agents to make mistakes with sources. It may also allow accusing individual agents of misconduct, while only accusing the FBI as an organization of mismanagement.

Objective #2 looks interesting to me.
Did someone intercept communications between FBI & CHS's to use that information against the FBI & their sources?
I've long suspected that crooks were spying upon the FBI & informants to escape justice.

I suspect that the use of warrantless spying tools to protect Swamp figures from the FBI, is what lead Mueller, Comey, & Wray to threaten to resign in 2004 to shut down or limit the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

The basic findings are pretty simple. The FBI did not have a solid process in place to vet & validate sources like Christopher Steele (or Sater or Trump) relying on the agents to trust their sources. Which makes it easy to manipulate them if you tell them what they want to hear.

The independent vetting committee, then had too few staff members to keep up with the job making for backlogs & inadequate vetting of CHSs. FBI spends an average of $42M on CHS per year with about 20% of their sources qualifying as "long-term" sources.

The FBI failed to provide compliance with rules designed to prevent sources & agents from going bad. Both are major risk factors as agents get too close to sources & sources can manipulate agents.

I wonder if McCabe 'managed' FBI source Oleg Deripaska for more than 5 years?

The backlog of cases can be a real issue, as a CHS continued working for the FBI until the Human Source Review Committee requested they be dropped as a source because they rated them as high risk because they were a child sex offender.

From 2011-2019, the FBI Directorate of Intelligence sent emails & memos changing processes without changing the policies or ensuring that the new processes did not conflict with the AG Guidelines. So when revised by DOJ in 2017, the revision missed these undocumented changes.

This one is very important, the FBI did not have adequate secure communications to prevent the identification of sources.
Poor safeguards on classified source communication systems may have allowed insider threats to identify FBI assets. #ButNothingsHappening

As of 2019, almost half of FBI's long-term sources are overdue for their validation reviews that are due every 5 years. A problem that has been known since 2015.

From 2011-2015, the FBI deprioritized long-term as a risk factor in & of itself. Adding more of them into the backlog behind what they viewed as higher risk CHSs.
But some agents were especially stupid in their relationships with CHSs, which is why they created these rules...

Nothing like inviting your source over to your private residence to party...
Sure there is no risk to the FBI or the sources from that stupidity!

From 2010 until 2019 the FBI had reduced the personnel assigned to it's validation office from 213 to 29! That would be great if they automated the process & reduced the human workload by 90%, but not in the FBI...

The FBI blames the bean counters, which is probably partially true....

It's very easy to move funds from a department not seen as priority, then ask Congress for more money to fix it.
It's personnel problems were similar, it wasn't a priority function so people came through in an Acting capacity or as place holders until field positions opened up.

But it lead to agents checking only 1-2 years worth of records on a source during their 5 year review (which was probably overdue anyway).
So they missed years of red flags on a good day....

Unlike in this corner of Twitter, no one at the FBI was doing deep dives on the credibility of their sources. Only hitting the summaries & talking points it seemed!

It seems the backlog on long-term source validations has improved, but it doesn't seem like anyone can prove why...

The reviews (cursory as they were) still resulted in 33% of the sources requiring some action to justify the continued use or validity of the source. With 1 out of 20 being recommended as closing them out as a source.

Though the FBI created a new (additional) vetting process for CHSs designated as Significant Sources.
This provides HQ oversight to important sources, but is a band aid rather than a full fledged vetting process at this point.

Other issues include that FBI Field Offices do not want to put derogatory information in the files to avoid generating Brady Material for trials. But then reviewers are stuck reviewing files that don't include sufficient data to make a judgement call. So they punt to the FO.

Compliance is also low & not in sufficient depth with the AG's rules requiring local annual validation of CHSs.

The security of communications with CHSs is also a major issue.

In other words, best practices have never become policy.

Then we hit the parts with black highlighter!

Communications with Highly Classified sources on weakly secured systems.

Systems especially vulnerable to insider threats within the FBI...

The report ends referring to previous reports on these issues. Most prevalent being the case of Chinese spy & FBI CHS Katrina Leung & her FBI agent handler, boyfriend, & co-conspirator. Six of the recommended action items from that 2006 OIG review are still pending...

We will see when the FBI is able to close these gaps & put in adequate measures to prevent FBI Confidential Human Sources from using FBI agents as their sources.

Can't wait to hear more about Chris Steele in a future report! @threadreaderapp unroll

@threadreaderapp Addendum:

A was reminded of this issue that I had touched on before. That the Russians had compromised the FBI's communications & was hacking their radio & netxel traffic in various field offices. Relevant to identifying US intel assets to feed them info. news.yahoo.com/exclusive-russ…