Inspector General Report Shows Special Counsel Replicated FBI Abuses thefederalist.com/2020/01/06/ins…
As the IG report noted, “on May 17, 2017, the Crossfire Hurricane cases were transferred to the Office of the Special Counsel,” and the FBI agents and analysts then began working with the special counsel.
A little more than a month later, the FBI asked the Department of Justice to seek a fourth extension of the Page surveillance order. That fourth renewal obtained under Mueller’s leadership included the 17 significant inaccuracies and omissions the IG identified.
It wasn’t merely a matter of Mueller’s team repeating the same falsehoods. Several of the inaccuracies and omissions presented to the FISA court in the late-June renewal application arose in mistakes or misconduct that occurred after Mueller took the reins of the investigation.
Most significantly, in June 2017, the FBI’s office of general counsel falsely represented that Page had not been a source for another federal agency, when, in reality, Page had been approved as an “operational contact” and the FBI’s attorney had been told so in an email.
Yet the final surveillance renewal application failed to inform the FISA court that, while Page had connections with individuals connected to Russian intelligence, he had provided information about those contacts to another agency as an approved source.
While blame for this mistake might be put down to the malfeasance of the attorney who altered the email to obscure Page’s relationships, Mueller’s team should have done more—not just for purposes of the FISA application, but as part of the special counsel investigation.
Mueller’s inept team instead parroted the point in the special counsel report, But Mueller made no mention of Page’s status as an “operational contact” for another agency.
Not only did Mueller’s team continue to push the same inaccuracies and omissions to the FISA court in the June 2017 renewal, the FISA court was not informed of the many mistakes and omissions for another year
Mueller’s team also knew, by July 2017 at the latest, that Joseph Mifsud had denied telling Papadopoulos that the Russians could assist the Trump campaign by leaking negative information on Clinton.
Prior to the special counsel’s appointment, the FBI had interviewed Papadopoulos and Mifsud, but it would be the special counsel’s office that indicted Papadopoulos in late July 2017, charging him with lying to the FBI.
In short, the special counsel’s team proved itself equally incompetent in investigating and screening the “intel” used to obtain the Page surveillance orders, and in failing to accurately and fully inform the FISA court (FISC) of the evidence gathered by the FBI.
It also wasn’t mere incompetence on display: The special counsel’s office also engaged in much of the same misconduct the IG identified.
For instance, emblematic of Mueller’s complicity in misconduct Horowitz identified is the fact that the special counsel continued to use Bruce Ohr as a conduit to feed “intel” to the FBI from Steele after Steele was terminated as a confidential human source.
Significantly the IG noted that after June 2017, “an agent from the Special Counsel’s Office became Ohr’s final point of contact through November 2017.” Thus Mueller’s team made a concerted decision to continue to use Ohr to obtain “intel” from Steele, a decision the IG condemned
It is now clear that the Mueller report omitted significant evidence relevant to whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
In fact,” the IG report provided more perspective on the question of Russia collusion than the entire $30-million special counsel probe.
In fact, Mueller’s failure to address the veracity, or rather the fallacy, of Steele’s dossier cements the reality that the special counsel sought not to discern the truth, but to bury Trump.
As “the Horowitz report makes clear, the FBI knew most of the Steele dossier’s claims were unreliable,” and “Team Mueller made a deliberate choice to tiptoe around it,”
“This makes no sense,” the editorial board reasoned. But it does. It makes eminent sense once you realize the special counsel office served to continue a witch hunt, and once those efforts proved unsuccessful, Mueller’s team reverted instead to obscuring that fact.
