Stephens: The federal bureau of dirty tricks
This month’s bombshell indictment of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who is charged with lying to the FBI and whose work turns out to have been the main source for Christopher Steele’s notorious dossier, is being treated as a major embarrassment for much of the news media — and, if the charges stick, that’s exactly what it is.
Put media criticism aside for a bit. What this indictment further exposes is that James Comey’s FBI became a Bureau of Dirty Tricks, mitigated only by its own incompetence. Donald Trump’s best move as president (about which I was dead wrong at the time) may have been to fire him.
If you haven’t followed thedrip-drip-dripof revelations, late in 2019 Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, published a damning report detailing “many basic and fundamental errors” by the FBI in seeking Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to surveil Carter Page, the American businessman fingered in the dossier as a potential link between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Shortly afterward, Rosemary Collyer, the court’s presiding judge, issued her own stinging rebuke of the bureau: “The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable,” she wrote.
Were the FBI’s errors a matter of general incompetence or of bias? There appears to be a broad pattern of FBI agents overstating evidence that corroborates their suspicions. That led to travesties such as the bureau hounding the wrong man in the 2001 anthrax attacks.
But it turns out the bureau can be both incompetent and biased. When the FBI applied for warrants to continue wiretapping Page, it already knew Page was helping the CIA, not the Russians. We know this because in August 2020 a former FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to rewriting an email to hide Page’s CIA ties.
And why would Clinesmith do that? It certainly helped the bureau renew its wiretap warrants on Page, and, as he once put it in a text message to a colleague, “viva la resistance.” When the purpose of government service is to stop “the crazies” (one of Clinesmith’s descriptions of the elected administration), then the ends soon find a way of justifying the means.
Which brings us to the grand jury indictment of Danchenko in the investigation being conducted by special counsel John Durham. Danchenko was Steele’s main source for the most attention-grabbing claims in the dossier, including the existence of a likely mythical “pee tape.” Steele, in turn, wrote his report for Fusion GPS, an opposition-research outfit that had been hired by a Washington law firm close to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Translation: The Steele dossier was Democratic Party-funded opposition research that had been sub-sub-sub-sub contracted to Danchenko, who now stands accused of repeatedly lying to the FBI about his own sources while also having been investigated a decade ago for possible ties to Russian intelligence. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty and adamantly denies Russian intelligence ties, and he deserves his day in court. He describes the raw intelligence he collected for Steele as little more than a collection of rumors and innuendo and alleges that Steele dressed them up for Fusion GPS.
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https://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/2021/11/20/stephens-federal-bureau-dirty-tricks/8650756002/