Notes show FBI lied to DOJ about Russian collusion

 Federalist:

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The FBI was represented at the meeting by three of its top officials: Deputy Director Andy McCabe, Counterintelligence Executive Assistant Director Bill Priestap, and Counterintelligence Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok. The DOJ was also represented by top-level officials, led by Acting Attorney General Dana Boente. Boente was taking the place of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself only four days previously.

The notes reveal a pattern of repeated lies and omissions by FBI leadership to DOJ officials that concealed the dramatic deterioration of the predicate for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. As the predication deteriorated, so too was the purported justification for Comey’s public reveal of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

The significance of the FBI’s lies was accentuated this week at Sussmann’s trial when Scott Hellman, an FBI cyber analyst, testified that he knew right away in September 2016 that Sussmann’s data did not suggest any covert communications between Trump and Russia. Hellman added that he wondered if the person who put together the data was suffering from a mental disability.

Hellman’s testimony is the clearest evidence yet that the FBI knew from the start that one of the two major components of the Trump Russia collusion narrative – the Alfa Bank data – was false. As the March 6 notes show, they concealed this fact from their DOJ superiors.

The other major component of the investigation was the Steele dossier. The FBI knew from a January 2017 interview of Igor Danchenko, Christopher Steele’s “Primary Sub-Source” through whom all the allegations in the Steele dossier were originated or channeled, that the dossier too was false.

Danchenko’s most shocking revelation to the FBI was that he had never met Sergei Millian, the attributed source for the Steele dossier’s most inflammatory claims, including the allegation that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Kremlin, that Russia passed hacked Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks, as well as the infamous Moscow pee tape story.

Danchenko, although a Russian national, was not “Russian-based,” as the FBI was claiming, but had lived and worked in Washington, D.C. for more than a decade, including at the Brookings Institute. Fiona Hill, a Brookings Institute stalwart, was a key supporter of Danchenko’s and had even introduced him to Steele in 2011. In 2016, Hill introduced Danchenko to former Hillary Clinton aide Charles Dolan. Danchenko would later use Dolan as a source for a number of his dossier claims.

Beyond the fact that Millian could not have been a source for the dossier, the FBI also learned from Danchenko that the dossier stories were based on bar talk and innuendo (Danchenko has since been charged by Durham with lying to the FBI about his sources).

The FBI appears to have concealed these matters from the DOJ. In fact, it does not appear from the March 6 notes that the FBI ever mentioned Danchenko. Despite Danchenko’s disavowal of the dossier as of March 6, it remained as the main component of the overall Crossfire Hurricane investigation, including being the basis of two Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

The March 6 notes also reveal that FBI leadership told DOJ officials that the Page FISA application had been “fruitful” even though it had turned up nothing of significance. Page was never charged with, or even accused of, any offense and is now suing the DOJ for damages.

FBI leadership also pushed the narrative on their DOJ counterparts that the dossier was “CROWN reporting,” implying that the dossier was an official United Kingdom intelligence product when it was actually made-up stories and gossip and paid for by the Clinton campaign – a fact the FBI knew from their Danchenko interview.

The notes cite “CROWN reporting” in connection with collusion allegations on at least two occasions. In Strzok’s exposition of the status of Page’s case, the notes indicate that Strzok referred to “Crown source reporting” as a key element in the Page FISA warrant. This was already known from unredacted portions of the FISA applications that were publicly disclosed in 2020. However, what was not known was that the FBI also lied internally about these facts to their DOJ supervisors.

Similarly, the March 6 notes indicate that, in connection with the status of the Manafort case, Strzok had reported that, based on “CROWN reporting,” the FBI had “looked at [the Republican] convention” and allegations that the Trump campaign had caused the convention to “soften stance on Crimea and NATO” in exchange for “Russian energy stocks.”

In fact, there is no reference to allegations about Crimea or NATO in Steele’s dossier. Strzok attributed these false accusations to “CROWN reporting,” presumably to lend weight to them with his DOJ superiors.

With respect to “Russian energy stocks,” the dossier includes a false reference to Page receiving a brokerage fee for the sale of a Russian energy company but this allegation is not related to the convention but to the lifting of sanctions. Again, Strzok falsely portrayed this as having something to do with the Republican Party’s convention.

Additionally, the notes show that lead agent Strzok also lied to DOJ officials about the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Strzok claimed the investigation was triggered by Trump when he jokingly asked Russia to publish Clinton’s missing 30,000 emails. It was Trump’s joke which, according to Strzok, caused the Australian diplomat to provide his tip about Trump aide George Papadopoulos to the U.S. embassy in London.

In truth, the diplomat provided his tip before Trump made the joke. Another fact that the FBI concealed in respect of the opening of Crossfire Hurricane was that their theory that Papadopoulos had advanced knowledge of the DNC hack was logically impossible. When Papadopoulos met the Australian diplomat on May 10, 2016, most of the hacked DNC emails hadn’t even been written yet.
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There is more. 

No one in the FBI has been held accountable for these lies and misdirections. It looks more like a search for a reason to impeach Trump than a real investigation.  There should never have been a Muller investigation if the FBI had been honest about what they knew.  I have always suspected that the Muller probe was really about trying to entrap Trump on a count of impeding the specious investagation.