Elder Patriot’s Opinion| Remember when Democrats and their sycophantic defenders in the media became apoplectic over Attorney General William Barr’s use of the word spying?
Here’s the exchanges that took place between New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen and the attorney general:
https://twitter.com/joshdcaplan/status/1115989106784337920
“One of the things that I want to do is pull together all the information from the various investigations that have gone on including on the Hill and in the department and see if there are any remaining questions to be addressed.”
When asked why he felt the need to do that he responded:
“Well, for the same reason we’re concerned about foreign influence in elections. We want to make sure that during elections… spying on a political campaign is a big deal.
“The generation that I grew up in, which was the Vietnam War, a period where people were concerned about spying on anti-war people and so forth by the government.
“And there were a lot of rules put in place to make sure that there was adequate basis before our law enforcement agencies get involved in political surveillance.
“I’m not suggesting those rules were violated but I think it’s important to look at that.
“I’m not talking about the FBI necessarily but intelligence agencies more broadly.”
https://twitter.com/joshdcaplan/status/1115992645975846912
That was really just an attempt to deflect from what Barr said after that. Barr followed by saying that spying would be fine as long as there was a proper predicate.
“I think spying did occur. Yes, I think spying did occur.
“The question is whether it was adequately predicated. I’m not suggesting it wasn’t adequately predicated, but I need to explore that.
“I think it is my obligation.”
Thanks to a typed memo and handwritten notes generated by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec it becomes clear why Democrats went ballistic and decided their best hope for surviving the public exposure of their illegal campaign to destroy Donald Trump is to destroy William Barr, as well.
Kavalec met with Christopher Steele 10 days prior to to first FISA warrant application against Trump campaign advisor Carter Page being submitted.
Steele is the former British spy who submitted the dossier containing disparaging and compromising allegations against Donald Trump.
Kavalec’s handwritten notes from that meeting, and her subsequent emails reveal that she had serious concerns about:
- Steele’s motives
- Inaccuracies in his claims
- His use of a select group of media friendlies (lefty propagandists) to increase the number of sources the FBI could point to when making application to the FISC.
State Department handwritte… by on Scribd
According to investigative journalist John Solomon writing in the Hill, Kavalec used her notes to notify the FBI of the issues she had detected in Christopher Steele’s claims days before the initial FISA warrant targeting Page was filed:
It is important to note that the FBI swore on Oct. 21, 2016, to the FISA judges that Steele’s “reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings” and the FBI has determined him to be “reliable” and was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to their informant, who simultaneously worked for Fusion GPS, the firm paid by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign to find Russian dirt on Trump.
That’s a pretty remarkable declaration in Footnote 5 on Page 15 of the FISA application, since Kavalec apparently needed just a single encounter with Steele at State to find one of his key claims about Trump-Russia collusion was blatantly false.
In her typed summary, Kavalec wrote that Steele told her the Russians had constructed a “technical/human operation run out of Moscow targeting the election” that recruited emigres in the United States to “do hacking and recruiting.”
She quoted Steele as saying, “Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami,” according to a copy of her summary memo obtained under open records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United. Kavalec bluntly debunked that assertion in a bracketed comment: “It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami.”
Kavalec, two days later and well before the FISA warrant was issued, forwarded her typed summary to other government officials. The State Department has redacted the names and agencies of everyone she alerted. It is unlikely that her concerns failed to reach the FBI.
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee and ranking member of its Subcommittee on Government Operations, told Solomon late Thursday he had confirmed with U.S. officials that Kavalec’s memo was forwarded to the FBI in the Oct. 13, 2016, email.
Rep. Meadows, one of only a handful of elected officials who have been pursuing the truth about what amounts to a coup d’etat against President Trump told Solomon:
“This once again shows officials at the FBI and (Department of Justice) DOJ were well aware the dossier was a lie — from very early on in the process all the way to when they made the conscious decision to include it in a FISA application. The fact that Christopher Steele and his partisan research document were treated in any way seriously by our Intelligence Community leaders amounts to malpractice.”
Despite this knowledge, eight days later, on October 21st, the FBI/DOJ persisted in using the dossier as the foundational evidence in securing a Title-1 FISA warrant against U.S. person Carter Page.
Then, on April 25, 2019 – just two weeks ago – FBI Director Christopher Wray classified Kavalec’s memo. Kinda odd for the man President Trump sent in to clean up the mess. Wouldn’t ya say?
Director Christopher Wray: Enabler of the Deep State. https://t.co/vnnF3pUduV
— Sebastian Gorka DrG (@SebGorka) May 8, 2019
This is the second instance of the FBI and DOJ ignoring exculpatory evidence in this warrant process.
You’d think that the “world’s premier law enforcement agency” would have figured out in their many hours of meeting with Steele what Kavalec discerned in just a few minutes with Steele.
The fact that they didn’t is concerning. But given Kavalec’s warning, the second member of the intelligence community to warn them about Steele, is alarming.
Yes, the second time. Recall Solomon’s January discovery that Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr had warned members of both the FBI and DOJ about Steele months before the first FISA application:
The then-No. 4 Department of Justice (DOJ) official briefed both senior FBI and DOJ officials in summer 2016 about Christopher Steele’s Russia dossier, explicitly cautioning that the British intelligence operative’s work was opposition research connected to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and might be biased.
Ohr’s briefings, in July and August 2016, included the deputy director of the FBI, a top lawyer for then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and a Justice official who later would become the top deputy to special counsel Robert Mueller.
At the time, Ohr was the associate attorney general. Yet his warnings about political bias were pointedly omitted weeks later from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant
The top deputy to Mueller was Andrew Weissmann.
It appears that the FBI was so desperate to secure the surveillance warrant that they didn’t care it the claims in their application were properly predicated.
This is what William Barr was referring to when he talked about the necessary predicate, and, “I’m not talking about the FBI necessarily but intelligence agencies more broadly.”
Kavalec’s memo confirms that Steele had approached the State Department as well as the FBI.
It’s likely that the CIA, under the direction of John Brennan, was the originating agency for the entire Steele Dossier construct.
The desperation that the FBI exhibited suggests that there was more to their spying operations than mistakenly relying on a conflation of lies developed by a political partisan.
It is now becoming more apparent that the FBI was seeking an insurance policy to prevent the long term Obama administration policy of spying on their political opponents from becoming public after the election of Donald Trump, by seeking to remove him from office.
