Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to FBI Directory Christopher Wray on September 20, 2017, asking if the FBI provided the Trump campaign with a defensive briefing regarding Russian interference in 2016.
Grassley is a hawk in government accountability.
The FBI replied with a letter that IG Horowitz’s Wednesday testimony proves was a lie, and exposed more spying and abuse of power of John Brennan’s CIA.
Wray needs to go. He has not been cooperative in the Spygate scandal, and has acted only to protect those involved.
“I write to inquire about whether the FBI ever provided the Trump campaign with a defensive briefing or other warning regarding attempts to infiltrate the campaign by people connected with, or compromised by, Russian intelligence,” Grassley wrote.
On October 26, 2017, the FBI responded by telling Grassley that the FBI did, in fact, provide a counterintelligence defense briefing to then candidate Donald Trump and to other campaign officials.
“In August of 2016 the FBI provided a counterintelligence defensive briefing to then candidate Donald Trump and other senior campaign officials.
This defensive briefing was conducted by an experienced FBI counterintelligence agent and focused on the broad range of threats posed by foreign intelligence entities,” wrote Gregory Brower, Assistant Director in the FBI’s Office of Congressional Affairs.
From The Federalist:
During Senate Judiciary Committee hearings with Horowitz on Wednesday, an exchange with Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina uncovered how the FBI not only failed to brief the Trump campaign on the alleged Russian interference they were so concerned about, but used their meeting with the campaign as an opportunity to spy.
“If this is a counterintelligence investigation, who are they trying to protect?” Graham asked Horowitz.
“Well, if it’s the threat outlined in the ‘Friendly Foreign Government Information’ you would be looking to protect the election process, which would include the campaign, the candidate, and the American people,” Horowitz said.
“Did [the FBI] ever brief Hillary Clinton about efforts to foreign influences involving her campaign? Do you know?” Graham asked.
“I’ve heard that, but I don’t know that for fact,” Horowitz said.
“They did. Good for them,” Graham said. “And they stopped it. Was there ever a defensive briefing given by the FBI Department of Justice to Donald Trump about the concerns?”
“There was not,” Horowitz said.
WATCH:
The FBI’s letter back to Grassley indicated that there’s no policy on briefings, and went on to say said briefings are an “essential FBI counterintelligence tool” for keeping up the legitimacy of the organization and fairness in practices. So, then why isn’t there a policy?
“While the FBI does not maintain a specific policy governing when such briefings are to be provided, as you highlighted in your letter, defensive briefings are an essential FBI counterintelligence tool,” the letter states.
According to what Graham pointed out during the hearing, there was counterintelligence work done in the briefing, but not on behalf or or in defense of the Trump campaign, and was instead used to father intelligence against the Trump campaign. That’s called spying.
“Did they ever try to protect Donald Trump from foreign influence?” Graham asked.
“They did not brief him,” Horowitz said.
“As a matter of fact, whenever they went in and gave him a vanilla briefing–‘the Russians are out there, you better beware,’–didn’t they have an FBI agent do a 302 on the defensive briefing itself?” Graham asked.
A 302 document is filled out by an FBI agent immediately after doing an interview where the agent writes down a summary of what happened during the interview. This is done as soon as possible when the agent’s memory of the interview is still fresh.
“They sent one of the supervisory agents from the Crossfire Hurricane team to the briefing and that agent prepared a report to the file of the briefing,” Horowitz said.
Why would the FBI send in an agent who ended up doing a 302 document on the supposed defensive briefing? A 302? Really? That’s for FBI agents to retain information from an interview with a witness.
Did the FBI consider the people they spoke to in the Trump campaign as witnesses to a crime? They didn’t do a 302 on Hillary Clinton or her campaign. In fact, they actually did a defensive briefing with the Clinton campaign, but not the Trump campaign.
They gathered so-called “evidence” instead. That’s called spying.
So, we learned from IG Horowitz’s testimony that the so-called FBI “defensive briefing” with the Trump campaign was not a defensive briefing by any stretch of the imagination, rather, it was used to spy on members of the Trump campaign to gather information against Donald Trump.
There is no other way to see it. Spying occurred and the FBI just got caught.
