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Who is Joseph Mifsud?
A congressional source last week said, “I don’t see any way the investigation can be aboveboard if Mifsud isn’t a Russian agent.”
Horowitz said all four of the FISA warrant applications for Carter Page relied upon a core probable-cause argument based on the idea that the FBI was conducting a legitimate investigation into Russian election interference.
Horowitz wrote that the “sole predication” for that investigation was a statement former Trump aide George Papadopoulos made to an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer. Papadopoulos allegedly told Downer that a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud told him that Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
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Someone is not telling the truth, Vol. 1:
The Horowitz report is not kind to former CIA chief John Brennan.
Brennan in May of 2017 testified before Congress that he was “aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons” that “served as the basis for the FBI investigation.”
Horowitz contradicts this:
We also asked those FBI officials involved . . . whether the FBI received any other information, such as from members of the USIC, that the FBI relied upon to predicate Crossfire Hurricane. All of them told us that there was no such information. . . . We also asked [James] Comey and [Andrew] McCabe about then-CIA Director John Brennan’s statements. . . . Comey told us that while Brennan shared intelligence . . . [he] did not provide any information that predicated or prompted the FBI to open Crossfire Hurricane.
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Someone is not telling the truth, Vol. 2:
In a related problem, Horowitz on pages 75-76 of his report says former Attorney General Loretta Lynch told his office that “in the spring of 2016, Comey and [former Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe pulled her aside and provided information about Carter Page, which Lynch believed they learned from another member of the Intelligence Community.”
Comey and McCabe both denied this, telling Horowitz they did not remember being told about Carter Page. With regard to Lynch’s recollection of a conversation, Comey said “he did not think it was possible for such conversation to have occurred in the spring of 2016 because the FBI did not receive the [tip from Alexander Downer] concerning Papadopoulos until late July.”
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To whom does footnote 461 refer?
At the bottom of page 310, Horowitz describes an unusual communication to the FBI by a “former” confidential informant:
[A] former FBI CHS . . . contacted an FBI agent in an FBI field office in late July 2016 to report information from “a colleague who runs an investigative firm . . . hired by two entities (the Democratic National Committee [DNC] as well as another individual . . . [who was] not name[d]) to explore Donald Trump’s longstanding ties to Russian entities.” The former CHS also gave the FBI agent a list of “individuals and entities who have surfaced in [the investigative firm’s] examination,” which the former CHS described as “mostly public source material.”
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Are media corrections forthcoming?
The Horowitz report makes clear that multiple news cycles over the past few years were dominated by reports that were either incorrect or lacking factual foundation.
These included assertions by multiple outlets that the Steele dossier was not central to the FBI’s efforts to secure a warrant on Page; that the FBI found Christopher Steele and his dossier “credible”; that tales of FISA abuse were a conspiracy theory (one of many claims Mother Jones called “bullshit”); that the memo written by Devin Nunes on the subject was wrong and had been “debunked”; that Russians “blocked” Trump from nominating Mitt Romney as secretary of state; that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was in Prague (presumably to meet Russian hackers); that a “pee tape” existed; that Russia’s Alfa Bank and the Trump campaign were communicating via a secret server; that the FISA warrant on Page must have been producing good intelligence in order to be renewed three times; and many other things.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/horowitz-report-russia-investigation-questions-remaining-928081/