When your best explanation for humiliating failures is that you were incompetent, not criminal, you are in trouble. When your defense is that underlings are to blame, you can expect them to bite back. That’s the situation facing James Comey, former FBI director. His current story matches Richard Nixon’s lame admission: “mistakes were made.”
Not that Comey made those mistakes himself, mind you. Mere sloppiness by others, he says. That’s his new story. His old one was that the FBI did everything by the book and that his critics were dishonest partisan hacks. His self-righteous stance went down the garbage disposal last week when Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued his devastating report and then told a Senate committee that Comey was wrong when he said the report vindicated him and the bureau.
Comey is still drifting down that river in Egypt, denying he failed in his basic duties. Yet he signed surveillance warrants as “truthful and verified” when he knew (or should have known) they were neither. He and senior officials at the Department of Justice used the same misinformation four times to spy on Carter Page, claiming, without evidence, that Page might be a Russian agent.
Caught in these lies, Comey is reluctantly admitting that he relied on the FBI’s standard procedures for gaining warrants and that underlings may have been careless. They may well have been, but so was Comey. Moreover, it was the director himself who gutted the safeguards designed to prevent overzealous agents from deceiving the court.
The errors were inexcusable. Comey and DoJ officials told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that Page might be a “foreign agent,” without telling them that Page had cooperated with U.S. intelligence for years -- and was still doing so. Special Counsel Robert Mueller examined Page and came up empty. The crime here was not Page’s. It was committed by top law-enforcement officers who misrepresented the evidence.
Once spying on Page and the Trump campaign became public knowledge, Comey and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff claimed it was all perfectly justified. After all, the warrants were approved by the FISA court. What they didn’t say was that the court had been given false and misleading information, while exculpatory evidence was withheld.
Why did senior FBI and DoJ officials care so much about spying on an unknown minor political figure? Because they expected Carter Page’s email, phone calls, and texts would open a window into the whole Trump campaign, transition, and presidency.
The heart of the warrant application was the “Steele Dossier,” which is filled with outrageous, unverified claims, many of which were absurd on their face, and some of which the FBI itself knew to be untrue. The New York Times, hardly a friend of Trump’s, says the dossier may well be Russian disinformation. Comey told President-elect Trump he had no confidence in the dossier, even as he was telling the FISA court the exact opposite. Comey’s briefing gave Trump very little information, but it did serve two purposes. First, it let Trump know that the bureau could damage him badly, even if the information was untrue (as Trump presumably knew). Second, it gave the media cover to hype the story once the bureau leaked news of the briefing. Until then, no reputable media would discuss the Steele Dossier because they couldn’t verify its claims.
Later, when news accounts said the dossier had been used to spy on an American citizen, Comey, Schiff, and their compatriots worked themselves into a lather over the word “spying,” while inaccurately downplaying Steele’s role. The dossier was merely part of a “broader mosaic,” as Comey put it. Elegant words. But are they true?
No. According to FBI internal communications at the time, the Steele dossier was the primary evidence in the application. The bureau’s own legal counsel called it “essentially a single source FISA” (Horowitz report, p. 132). A top FBI agent confirmed that point, telling Congress the warrant would never have been approved without the dossier. IG Horowitz said the same thing, calling the Steele dossier “central and essential” to gaining the warrant. Still, Comey and Schiff stuck with that story until last week. So did the mainstream media, to their lasting damage. The Horowitz report sank it.
Comey is still clinging to the fiction. On Sunday, when questioned by Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Comey denied the dossier was bunk and added that the warrant application included lots of additional information. Actually, a key part of that “mosaic” was yet another fable from Christopher Steele, deceptively repackaged. Steele was the hidden source for a Yahoo! News story, which the FBI apparently folded it into its warrant application. Got that? Steele was the “independent” support for his own dossier. Was the bureau really fooled? Not likely, since officials already knew Steele was shopping his report to the media and they had fired him for it. They also knew he had spoken to the U.S. State Department without authorization. They hid all that damaging information from the court. That’s not sloppy. That’s deceit.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/ar...ry_141977.html
[Reply]
