Taking Back Our Stolen History
DOJ Inspector General Horowitz Releases FISA Report
DOJ Inspector General Horowitz Releases FISA Report

DOJ Inspector General Horowitz Releases FISA Report

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s long-awaited Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act report was publicly released on Monday 12/9/2019, concluding the FBI did mislead the FISA court to obtain warrants to spy on Trump campaign officials.

The IG’s report of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into “Russian collusion” lays out incontrovertible evidence that the Bureau misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court through false information and omissions to surveil Trump campaign associates like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.

The report details how the FBI “fell far short” of vetting the accuracy of FISA applications, knowingly withheld exculpatory information, used “defensive briefings” to secretly assess the Trump campaign, and used known illegitimate sources in the pursuit of FISA warrants.

“Our review found that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are ‘scrupulously accurate,’” the report stated.

“The Crossfire Hurricane team failed to inform Department officials of significant information that was available to the team at the time that the FISA applications were drafted and filed.”

“Much of that information was inconsistent with, or undercut, the assertions contained in the FISA applications that were used to support probable cause and, in some instances, resulted in inaccurate information being included in the applications,” stated the report.

However, the report also concluded that the FBI’s decision to obtain a FISA warrant against Trump campaign associate Carter Page was not politically motivated.

“We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the FBI’s decision to seek FISA authority on Carter Page,” the report said.

Larry Klayman reacts to Michael Horowitz IG FISA Report pointing out how it protected the deep state:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7e5kjhqfT4

Attorney General William Barr responded to the IG’s findings, claiming in a statement that it conclusively shows the FBI spied on Trump based on the “thinnest of suspicions.”

“The inspector general’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions, that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” Barr said. “It is also clear that, from its inception the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory.”

“In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source. The Inspector General found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory,” Barr continued.

“While most of the misconduct identified by the Inspector General was committed in 2016 and 2017 by a small group of now-former FBI officials, the malfeasance and misfeasance detailed in the Inspector General’s report reflects a clear abuse of the FISA process.”

Likewise, U.S. attorney John Durham, who is conducting his own investigation into the origins of the Russia collusion hoax, said in a stunning statement that he disagreed “with some of the report’s conclusions as to the predication and how the FBI case was opened.”

Here is a link to the full report.

From the report:

DOJ OIG Releases Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz announced today the release of a Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation. The DOJ Office of the Inspector General’s (OIG) findings are summarized in the report’s Executive Summary.

There were 17 significant inaccuracies and omissions in the FISA report and numerous others labeled as less significant. Seven occurred in the first FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page and another ten were identified by the DOG IG in subsequent reports. But the DOJ IG claimed one was the worst.

Here is the list of initial seven issues identified in the first FISA application (paraphrased) –

1. Omitted information that Carter Page worked for another government agency – the only agency that they talk of in this manner is the CIA.
2. Provided a statement on Christopher Steele that overstated his past and needed to be ran by Steele’s agent per the law but it wasn’t.
3. Omitted information from Steele’s source who was known as a ‘boaster’ and ’embellisher’.
4. Lied and stated that Steele did not provide an article to Yahoo News when he had and they knew it.
5. Omitted that Papadopoulos had stated that nobody in Trump campaign had collaborated with Russia.
6. Omitted Page’s words that he never met or worked with Manafort which was in contrast to report claiming they were working on a conspiracy with Russia.
7. Claimed Page was an agent of Russia but omitted statements that Page made that contradicted this assertion.

Here are the remaining ten issues that were associated with renewal applications (paraphrased) –

8. Omitted the fact that Steele’s primary sub source had made allegations that raised significant concerns with the reliability of his information used by Steele.
9. Omitted Pages prior relationship with another government agency and an OGC Attorney altered an email from Carter Page that stated that Page was a source to then say Page was not a source.
10. Omitted information that Steele had done things like ‘pursued people with political risk’, ‘didn’t always use the best judgement’, etc…
11. Omitted information from Bruce Ohr that Steele was paid by the Clinton campaign and Simpson was paying Steele and Steele was desperate not to see Trump get elected’.
12. Failed to update information that Simpson was hired by the Democrat Party and/or DNC.
13. Failed to correct assertion in FISA application that Steele did not give information to Yahoo.
14. Omitted the finding that Steele was suitable for continued operation based on information that his dossier was minimally corroborated.
15. Omitted Papadopolous information to that Trump campaign was not involved in DNC email hack.
16. Omitted Joseph Mifsud’s denials that he supplied information to Papadopoulos that suggested Trump campaign received information from Russia.
17. Omitted information that Page played no role in the Republican platform change on Russia’s annexation of Ukraine as alleged in the report.

Notice that NOT ONE of these criminal acts of bias HELPED Donald Trump or his campaign or administration! Every “flaw” in the investigation assisted the crooked FBI and their team of Obama investigators! IG Horowitz, an Obama-appointee, concluded that the FBI investigation into Trump was justified and not politically motivated.1 Right! And I’m Micky Mouse!

Of these issues the most significant was related to the sub-source used by Christopher Steele in the now totally discredited dossier used to obtain the FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page and President Trump.  This is stated in the report –

Lori Colley looks at the report:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK5_31XZoXo

The fact that Steele’s dossier was based on second hand information from a known ‘boaster’ and ’embellisher’ is shocking and damaging to the FBI’s case that they had information to spy on President Trump –

The report totally refutes the claim made by former FBI Director James Comey in 2018 that the surveillance of Trump’s campaign was done in a “responsible” way, adding that suggesting the FISA process was abused was “nonsense.”

It also refutes remarks by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in 2018 that the FBI did not spy on Trump or anyone associated with his campaign.

Contained within the FISA report is the revelation that Fusion GPS, the firm paid by the Clinton campaign to produce the Steele dossier, “was paying Steele to discuss his reporting with the media.” (P. 369 and elsewhere)

And when did Steele talk with the media (which got him fired as an FBI source)? September of 2016, roughly six weeks before the election. One of the more damaging articles to result from these meetings was authored by Yahoo News journalist Michael Isikoff, who said in an interview that he was invited by Fusion GPS to meet a “secret source” at a Washington restaurant.

That secret source was none other than Christopher Steele, a former MI-6 Russia expert who fed the Isikoff information for a September 23, 2016 article – which would have had far greater reach and impact coming from such a widely-read media outlet vs. $100,000 in Russian-bought Facebook ads.

Put another way, Hillary Clinton paid Christopher Steele to feed information to the MSM in order to harm Donald Trump right before the 2016 election. Granted, there were intermediaries; the Clinton campaign paid law firm Perkins Coie, which paid Fusion GPS, which paid Steele. And if asked, we’re guessing Clinton would claim she had no idea this happened – which, quite frankly, simply isn’t plausible given the stakes. Whatever the case – the act of Simpson paying Steele to peddle fiction to the media for the purpose of harming Trump, by itself, constitutes blatant election meddling by every standard set by the left over the past three years.

A very disturbing fact about the wire tapping request of President Trump is that the FISA Court turned down President Obama’s Administration’s first request to wire tap President Trump that was evidently signed off on by Attorney General Lynch. With only two applications denied out of 10,700 from 2009 through 2015, the fact that the Obama Administration’s application was denied by the FISA Court is very disturbing. The odds of this happening were 0.02%.

The DOJ OIG FISA Report does not mention that the first FISA warrant for Carter Page was denied.  It only states that the Deep State attempted to put together information to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page in August 2016 and by September, the Deep State believed they had enough information to obtain the warrant.

We know that the first FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page and Trump was obtained in October 2016 shortly before the 2016 Presidential election.  This now confirmed garbage report was then renewed three times.

Omissions like this leave the reader to question the validity of the the entire FISA Report.  Was more than this omitted from the massive report?  If so, why?

The Conservative Treehouse found discrepancies with two statements on the FBI’s use of CHSs into the 2016 Trump campaign that contradict each other:

In chapter ten of the report, on page #312 you will find the following information. The claim is that no-one in the FBI initiated any use of “Confidential Human Sources” into the campaign prior to opening the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Read Carefully:

“In our review, we did not find any evidence that the FBI used CHSs or UCEs to interact with members of the Trump campaign prior to the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”…

However, in the very next chapter (#11, page #400), in the original IG report as released on December 9th, 2019, you will find the following statement:

“We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team tasked several CHSs and UCEs during the 2016 presidential campaign, which resulted in multiple interactions with Carter Page and Papadopoulos, both during and after the time they were affiliated with the Trump campaign”…

The IG report was modified after publication to change this paragraph.

Did Horowitz stealth-edit his report to cover for Joseph Mifsud and the FBI’s early surveillance of Page and Papadopoulos?

The report also revealed that the late Senator John McCain provided disgraced former FBI chief James Comey with five separate reports from Christopher Steele that the FBI didn’t previously possess related to unsubstantiated allegations of collusion between Russia and President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

The IG report also verifies that an unnamed McCain aid (known to be David J. Kramer, who also infamously provided BuzzFeed with the Steele dossier) obtained the Steele reports directly from Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, meaning that when McCain transferred the anti-Trump charges to Comey he had to have known that the material originated with a firm that specializes in controversial opposition tactics.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General’s (IG’s) Report on FISA Abuse points out a number of conflicting statements.  One of the biggest whoppers is between Obama’s Attorney General (AG) Loretta Lynch and former and now fired FBI Directors James Comey and Andrew McCabe.  Not to be outdone, former Deputy Attorney General (DAG) Rod Rosenstein makes suspect claims himself. Read more at The Gateway Pundit…

Margot Cleveland at the Federalist unraveled a number of actions that the Mueller gang participated in, some that were unknown before the IG report was released.  Cleveland starts with this:

The IG’s report on the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI’s handling of the Carter Page surveillance applications established 17 significant inaccuracies and omissions in the FISA application and renewals. (Eighteen if you include the one the IG missed). The 400-page report also established that the special counsel’s office was complicit in the FISA abuse, the probe was a witch hunt, and Mueller’s report was a cover-up for systematic government malfeasance.

The Mueller team filed the fourth and final FISA Application for Carter Page that included the 17 significant inaccuracies and omissions identified by IG Horowitz:

As the IG report noted, “on May 17, 2017, the Crossfire Hurricane cases were transferred to the Office of the Special Counsel,” and the FBI agents and analysts then began working with the special counsel. A little more than a month later, the FBI asked the Department of Justice to seek a fourth extension of the Page surveillance order. That fourth renewal obtained under Mueller’s leadership included the 17 significant inaccuracies and omissions the IG identified.

Mueller kept from the FISA that Carter Page worked for a US Government Agency:

Most significantly, in June 2017, the FBI’s office of general counsel falsely represented that Page had not been a source for another federal agency, when, in reality, Page had been approved as an “operational contact” and the FBI’s attorney had been told so in an email. Yet the final surveillance renewal application failed to inform the FISA court that, while Page had connections with individuals connected to Russian intelligence, he had provided information about those contacts to another agency as an approved source.

Evidence shows the Mueller gang knew that Joseph Mifsud was not a Russia asset yet they never let this information out:

Mueller’s team also knew, by July 2017 at the latest, that Joseph Mifsud—the Maltese professor who supposedly tipped then-Trump aide George Papadopoulos to the Russians having dirt on Hillary Clinton—had denied telling Papadopoulos that the Russians could assist the Trump campaign by leaking negative information on Clinton. Prior to the special counsel’s appointment, the FBI had interviewed Papadopoulos and Mifsud, but it would be the special counsel’s office that indicted Papadopoulos in late July 2017, charging him with lying to the FBI.

The Mueller gang’s relationship with Bruce Ohr and Christopher Steele was hidden, from the DOJ and the American people.  Notes were to be kept for interactions between these individuals but they kept these meetings in secret:

Significantly, the IG noted that after June 2017, “an agent from the Special Counsel’s Office became Ohr’s final point of contact through November 2017.” Thus, Mueller’s team made a concerted decision to continue to use Ohr to obtain “intel” from Steele—a decision the IG condemned.

In fact, the special counsel’s use of Ohr appears even more problematic than the FBI’s prior mishandling of their meetings with Ohr: At least prior to Mueller’s appearance, the FBI documented the details of their conversations with Ohr in FD-302 forms, but as the IG report noted, while Ohr continued to communicate with Steele through the end of November 2017 and passed on the details of those conversations to the FBI, “the FBI did not memorialize any meetings its agents had with Ohr after the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was transferred to the Special Counsel’s Office in May 2017.”

Further, while the special counsel’s team continued to meet with Ohr during this time, no one from Mueller’s group informed DOJ leadership of Ohr’s involvement in the investigation nor his meetings with Steele until “after Congress requested information from the Department regarding Ohr’s activities in late November 2017.”

The IG unveils that Mueller’s ‘pitbull’, the corrupt Andrew Weissmann, was involved in the Russia Hoax before the 2016 election.  When he attended Hillary’s election loss party, Weissmann was already involved in corrupt and  criminal actions to remove President Trump office:

between November 16, 2016 and December 15, 2016, Ohr participated in several meetings that were attended, at various times, by some or all of the following individuals: Swartz, Ahmad, Andrew Weissmann (then Section Chief of CRM’s Fraud Section), Strzok, and Lisa Page. The meetings involving Ohr, Swartz, Ahmad, and Weissmann focused on their shared concern that the [Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section] MLARS was not moving quickly enough on the Manafort criminal investigation and whether there were steps they could take to move the investigation forward. The meetings with Strzok and Page focused primarily on whether the FBI could assess the case’s relevance, if any, to the FBI ‘s Russian interference investigation. MLARS was not represented at any of these meetings or told about them, and none of attendees had supervisory responsibility over the MLARS investigation….

On January 31, 2017, one day after Yates was removed as DAG, Ahmad, by then an Acting CRM Deputy Assistant Attorney General, after consulting with Swartz and Weissmann, sent an email to Lisa Page, copying Weissmann, Swartz, and Ohr, requesting a meeting the next day to discuss ‘a few Criminal Division related developments.’ The next day, February 1, Swartz, Ohr, Ahmad, and Weissmann met with Strzok, Lisa Page, and an FBI Acting Section Chief. None of the attendees at the meeting could explain to us what the ‘Criminal Division related developments’ were, and we did not find any.

Meeting notes reflect, among other things, that the group discussed the Manafort criminal investigation and efforts that the Department could undertake to investigate attempts by Russia to influence the 2016 elections. MLARS was not represented at, or told about, the meeting.

In the end, the Mueller gang’s purpose was to continue the crimes and do all they could to remove President Trump from office:

In fact, Mueller’s failure to address the veracity, or rather the fallacy, of Steele’s dossier cements the reality that the special counsel sought not to discern the truth, but to bury Trump. (TGP)

Also, an email revealed from the report proves disgraced ex-FBI Director James Comey personally approved an FBI effort to have the wild and unsubstantiated “golden showers” claim about President Trump included in material to be considered for publication in the U.S. Intelligence Community’s official report on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The IG report further discloses a separate email in which Andrew McCabe, who served under Comey as the FBI’s deputy director, specifically wanted dossier author Christopher Steele’s unverified “pee” charges against Trump to be included in the body of the January 6, 2017 U.S. Intelligence Community report, known as the ICA, assessing alleged Russian interference efforts.

Comey himself personally approved of the inclusion of Steele’s wild claims in the ICA assessment, an email published in the IG report discloses. The IG report relates that the CIA did not want Steele’s claims to be included at all, downgrading Steele’s charges to “internet rumor.” Still, Comey and McCabe pushed for the wild anti-Trump claims to be part of the ICA assessment, which was ultimately made public. – read more

Eric Felton at Real Clear Investigations observed: “Buried in IG Report: How an FBI Team in Rome Gave Steele Highly Guarded Secrets.”

Felton points to a meeting in Rome a month before the 2016 election:

A month before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI met Christopher Steele in Rome and apparently unlawfully shared with the foreign opposition researcher some of the bureau’s most closely held secrets, according to unpublicized disclosures in the recent Justice Department Inspector General report on abuses of federal surveillance powers.

What’s more, Steele, the former British spy who compiled the “dossier” of conspiracy theories for the Hillary Clinton campaign, was promised $15,000 to attend the briefing by FBI agents eager to maintain his cooperation in their Trump-Russia collusion investigation codenamed Crossfire Hurricane.

That investigation was so closely guarded that only a handful of top officials and agents at the FBI were allowed to know about it.

The report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz details how a team of FBI agents in early October 2016 shared with Steele extensive classified materials, just weeks before the bureau cut off ties with him for leaking his own research to the media. The secrets included foreign intelligence information still considered so sensitive that the IG’s report refers to it even now only as coming from a “Friendly Foreign Government.” In fact, this is a reference to Australia. That country’s ambassador to Britain sent the United States a tip about loose talk by junior Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. The FBI has described that as the predicate for its Trump-Russia investigation.

The IG report also discloses that FBI agents knew Steele worked for Glenn Simpson, whose opposition research firm Fusion GPS was paying Steele to dig up dirt on Trump for the Clinton campaign, and that Steele informed the FBI that the “candidate” – Clinton herself – knew about Steele’s work.

According to author of “The Plot Against President Trump“, Lee Smith, the information sharing between the Clinton campaign and the DOJ-FBI was much more extensive than previously reported. He says:

We have known for a long time, of course, that Steele and the Clinton Campaign was providing information to the FBI.  It now appears the FBI was giving information to the Clinton campaign, as well.  Was that in order to direct the FISA so that they could obtain the spy warrant?…  People involved who were sharing this information with Steele including Peter Strzok and Bill Priestap.

Via The Ingraham Angle:

In February 2020, an FBI agent primarily responsible for “significant” errors in the FISA process mentioned in the DOJ IG’s FISA abuse report was identified. “Case Agent 1” was identified by the New York Times as Stephen A. Somma, a counterintelligence investigator who worked in the FBI’s New York field office. Somma was “primarily responsible for some of the most significant errors and omissions” and he was the agent who initially sought a FISA warrant on Carter Page, according to the IG report. Somma’s first FISA request was rejected, but later got approved after he used information provided by Christopher Steele’s garbage Hillary-funded dossier — he omitted the fact that Steele was his primary source for information in the Russia dossier.

Horowitz said that Somma along with an unnamed Staff Operations Specialist “were the original Crossfire Hurricane team members who had primary responsibility over the Carter Page investigation.” FBI documents showed that in August 2016 right after Crossfire Hurricane was opened, Somma was told he had “not yet presented enough information to support a FISA application targeting Carter Page.”

Somma told the IG’s investigators “that the team’s receipt of the reporting from Steele in September supplied missing information in terms of what Page may have been doing during his July 2016 visit to Moscow and provided enough information on Page’s recent activities that he thought would satisfy the Office of Intelligence.”

“Case Agent 1 said he prepared the FISA request form,” Horowitz said. “The FISA request form drew almost entirely from Steele’s reporting in describing the factual basis to establish probable cause to believe that Page was an agent of a foreign power.”

“We found no information indicating that the FBI provided the Office of Intelligence with the documents containing Page’s denials before finalizing the first FISA application,” Horowitz wrote. “Instead, Case Agent 1 provided a summary that did not contain those denials to the OI Attorney and that the OI Attorney relied upon that summary in drafting the first application.”

As usual, Horowitz covered for Somma and said he didn’t have enough information to determine “whether it was sheer gross incompetence that led to this versus intentional misconduct or anything in between.” In January 2020,  the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] admitted in a secret order that at least two of the spy warrants against Carter Page were not lawfully authorized.

Sources: