Justice Department Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz released his report on FISA abuse on Dec. 9, providing a condemnation of activities undertaken by the FBI.

The focus of the IG Report was abuse of the FISA process and the findings of the IG show numerous problems with the actions by FBI agents in obtaining the FISA warrant used to spy on Trump 2016 presidential campaign adviser Carter Page.Continue Reading

Kevin Clinesmith sent multiple text messages showing strong bias against Trump, including “Viva le resistance”

A former FBI attorney reportedly referred for criminal prosecution by Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz—for allegedly altering an email connected to the surveillance warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page—was assigned in early 2017 as “the primary FBI attorney assigned” to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into alleged Russian election interference.

The lawyer, who has been identified as Kevin Clinesmith in media reports, had been incorrectly portrayed by many members of the media as a “low-level” or junior member of the FBI’s legal team.Continue Reading

US Attorney John Durham reportedly ‘very interested’ in interviewing former CIA Director John Brennan and former DNI James Clapper

John Durham, the U.S. attorney tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016, is expected to seek an interview with former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper following an expansion of his investigation.

It was reportedly the meetings Durham and Attorney General William Barr recently had in Rome—where they obtained new evidence—that were the impetus for the broadening of the scope of the probe.Continue Reading

John Durham, the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI’s probe into the Trump campaign, has obtained two cell phones belonging to Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud.

Mifsud, who disappeared from public view shortly after his name was outed in the media in 2017, played a key role in events that led the FBI to investigate the Trump campaign. The news of the cell phones was first made known in an Oct. 15, 2019, filing by Sidney Powell, the attorney for Trump’s former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. In the motion, she requested that the U.S. Government be ordered to “produce evidence that has only recently come into its possession.”Continue Reading

Accusations against President Donald Trump that he used his office to pressure Ukraine to investigate a political rival have renewed scrutiny of actions taken by the Obama administration in Ukraine between 2014 and 2016.Continue Reading

The revelation of the alleged extraction of a Russian CIA spy has raised a number of questions, including how the CIA used the information it received—and the quality of that information.

Notably, the spy appears to have been a key source for the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

A closer examination of the spy’s alleged background, however, paints a complicated picture. The spy’s direct supervisor appears to have been mentioned in the Steele dossier, and it’s possible that information provided by the spy may have been included in the dossier.Continue Reading

CNN on Sept. 9 reported that in “a previously undisclosed secret mission in 2017, the United States successfully extracted from Russia one of its highest-level covert sources inside the Russian government.”

CNN wrote that “knowledge of the Russian covert source’s existence was highly restricted within the US government and intelligence agencies” and that “according to one source, there was ‘no equal alternative’ inside the Russian government, providing both insight and information on Putin.”

The article alleged that the decision to remove the highly placed mole from within the Kremlin was driven, in large part, by concerns that President Donald Trump and those within his administration had mishandled classified intelligence, thereby compromising the source’s safety.Continue Reading

Newly released emails by the Department of Justice (DOJ) reveal details about the internal response by the agency to allegations that then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had wanted to wiretap President Donald Trump and invoke the 25th Amendment against him.

The allegations were first reported by The New York Times on September 2018. The article, headlined “Rod Rosenstein Suggested Secretly Recording Trump and Discussed 25th Amendment,” claimed that the “deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, suggested last year that he secretly record President Trump in the White House to expose the chaos consuming the administration, and he discussed recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office for being unfit.”

The New York Times article included a response statement from Rosenstein, who refuted the story, calling it “inaccurate and factually incorrect”:Continue Reading

While the meeting was described by former FBI Director James Comey as a ‘defensive briefing,’ it was used to gain information from Trump, new IG report reveals

Former FBI Director James Comey’s first meeting with then-President-elect Donald Trump appears to have been part of the agency’s counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign.

Comey has described the Jan. 6, 2017, briefing at Trump Tower as a defensive briefing intended to inform the president-elect of salacious allegations contained in the so-called “Steele dossier.”

He had testified to Congress on June 8, 2017, that he “was briefing [Trump] on it because, because we had been told by the media it was about to launch. We didn’t want to be keeping that from him. He needed to know this was being said. I was very keen not to leave him with an impression that the bureau was trying to do something to him.”

Comey’s testimony to Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz, as part of the agency’s investigation into Comey, however, paints a different picture.Continue Reading