Thread by @thomasafine

The more I read over the heavily redacted page 338 and 339 from the IG report, the more it looks like a description of someone in the Trump administration providing illegally obtained information to a pro-Trump FBI agent.

Probably just confirmation bias.

Right?

I should probably back off of the "in the Trump administration" and weaken it at least to "associated with", as the pro-Trump Handling Agent referred to the connection as a "hobby" or "outside interest".

But this source provided something to the FBI that required additional justification during the IG investigation, and which was so inappropriate that there was an issue with simply storing it in FBI files.

And the Handling Agent repeatedly emphasized that whatever this material was, it was not asked for, but volunteered, also suggesting that it may have been inappropriate to ask for it.

So let's just review what we know about this source.

There's a section of the IG report on Confidential Human Sources (CHS) that were not part of Crossfire Hurricane. It's about four pages long.

The CHS I'm talking about here is almost two of those pages, and accounts for nearly all redactions in that section.

We know that the source was associated in some way with the Trump campaign — because that's the entire point of this whole section on CHSs), and because the redactions hint at it.

We know the source is pro-Trump — the report explicitly says this.

We know the sources handler, AND co-case handler, AND supervising agent were ALL pro-Trump. A pro-Trump CHS run by at least three pro-Trump FBI agents.

We know that these agents were not part of Crossfire Hurricane, and that they worked in a field office, not headquarters.

We don't know what field office, but we do have at least one hint. Maybe someone else can correlate this court order to a known event somewhere?

We also know from this that they didn't know hardly anything about Crossfire Hurricane (or didn't tell the IG if they did).

We know that they provided the FBI with lots of information about something that was for the most part not directly related to Crossfire Hurricane.

We know that one piece of this information was forwarded to Crossfire Hurricane.

And we know that this led to additional information being requested by Crossfire Hurricane, which was also forwarded.

Since this CHS was not tasked with interacting with anyone in the Trump campaign, I assume the above redacted block refers to additional information that was already collected by the CHS, although this could be a task to the CHS to retrieve information with no interaction.

The disposition of the information sent to Crossfire Hurricane is complex. For one thing, It was simultaneously "not anything significant" and at "the heart of the question of ... conspiracy".

(not saying these statements are in conflict, see next tweet)

There is a chance that the above two quotes are about two different parts of the transferred information. It could also be that it was information that was hypothetically very important, but didn't pan out at all.

But the disposition of this information is complex for another more important reason. There was something troubling about this information, which raised alarm bells with the IG. It seems like they needed to purge this information but this is a guess.

This seems to be a critical matter within these two pages, and one of the reasons (but not the only reason) why this CHS got so much attention. It was also mentioned in the introduction, on page xviii

I don't know what this means. What would the FBI not be allowed to keep on file? The only thing I can think of for sure is something that was illegally obtained.

But it could also be that this is connected to the identity of the CHS, which is a central question in these pages.

A big issue throughout this section is a difference of opinion or knowledge on how important and how connected this person was with respect to Trump. While the agent characterized the campaign interest as a "hobby", the IG thought he was someone much more important.

How important was this CHS? Seems pretty important based on the first clip below (from pg. 340). The second clip, from the introduction thinks this CHS should have been labelled a "sensitive source"

I don't know exactly what a "sensitive source" is and have had a hard time finding out, which is why I tweeted this late last night.

https://twitter.com/thomasafine/status/1207554784192073728

But it's pretty clear that this person was either high profile or had a very strong connection to the campaign (despite what the handling agent says he/she believed).

For a CHS that was not tasked to do anything with the campaign, and who's information was not useful, the Inspector General spent a long time on this person, and generated recommendations for changes in policy based on their handling.

I suspect this bit from page 353 is related:

My interest in delving into so much detail here is the theory — which I first heard from @SethAbramson many months (or years?) ago — that FBI agents in the NY field office were feeding information to someone associated with the Trump campaign to generate leverage against @Comey.

Which ultimately led to the infamous Comey Letter, which many feel was the last nail in Hillary's electoral coffin.

At this point, I can't even rule out that the CHS was Rudy himself. Though I don't consider that to be likely because how could the IG believe an FBI agent that would say he had no idea that Rudy was connected to Trump?

(In fairness, I had no idea back then.)

At any rate, the identity was significant enough to be troubling to the IG, signifiant enough that the IG thinks they should've considered putting the CHS relationship on hold during the campaign, and significant enough to lead to policy change recommendations.