I'll dispense with some of the more or less extraneous information in the article and focus on what I view as essential. Solomon, for our purposes, first points out abuses in informant programs runs by federal agencies. Note that the abuse involves paying a federal employee for reporting information that he should be reporting in the first place:
Some examples of the DOJ’s problems with informers fall outside the Russia case but mirror the same issues unmasked in the now-debunked probe of Trump.
Take, for example, the DOJ inspector general’s finding this month that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was paying other government officials at the Homeland Security Department’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to work as informants.
The IG spared few words in decrying the idiocy of allowing government security officers collecting a federal salary to double-dip into taxpayers’ money by receiving informant pay to report criminal activity they were required by their jobs to disclose.
What does this have to do with the Russia Hoax? Was Bruce Ohr an actual informant for the FBI? A paid informant? At this point I believe the answer is, No. No, but only because DoJ and the FBI were a bit more clever than DEA.
We all know about Bruce Ohr's role in feeding the Steele dossier to the FBI and the DoJ itself, even as Steele was peddling the same material to media outlets and the State Department. Notice, I said "to the DoJ itself," because Ohr has testified that he was keeping DoJ officials who were subordinate to him--like Andrew Weissmann--"in the loop" regarding the Russia Hoax.
We also know that when Steele was "fired" by the FBI as an informant, Ohr served as the backdoor conduit for Steele's (and, importantly, Fusion GPS's Glenn Simpson's) material to the FBI. That was accomplished in part by turning his wife Nellie's Fusion GPS work product on Manafort and the Trump family over to the FBI--campaign oppo research gleaned from corrupt Ukrainian officials.
Now we come to the significant part:
Ohr also didn’t get compensated as a paid informant, like the TSA workers. But documents show a curious thing happened during the time he began peddling the anti-Trump intelligence from his wife and Steele: His annual performance bonus doubled from about $14,000 in November 2015 to $28,000 in November 2016.
Oh! That's interesting!
Question: Was that big increase in effect a payment for Ohr acting as an informant? Here's where this gets potentially sticky for Ohr, and others at DoJ.
Ohr has said that he kept subordinates "in the loop" on the Russia Hoax, but he has maintained, under oath, that he kept his superiors in the dark as to what he was doing beyond his official duties. Recall, Ohr was at the top of DoJ's non-political staff. So, very much to the point, he has stated that he kept Sally Yates--the person who would have had to have approved that twofold increase in Ohr's bonus--in the dark. Really? If so, then how did Yates justify that hefty increase? Because she had to justify it--in writing. Has she been asked about this? We know that she has testified under oath, as well. Did she approve a bonus for Ohr that had nothing to do with his official duties--that would have had to have been specified for purposes of the bonus? Did Ohr accept that bonus knowing all this?
Solomon doesn't ask these questions, but I'd be very surprised if it's exactly these questions that the person feeding this information to Solomon has in mind. In that case, there are people at DoJ (Ohr) or who were formerly at DoJ (Yates) who may find themselves under increasing pressure to cooperate. Maybe, too, this is what Joe diGenova was talking about when he said officials were rushing to be reinterviewed, to clean up their previous stories.
ADDENDUM: Another interesting aspect to all this. Bruce Ohr says Sally Yates was kept in the dark about his involvement. OTOH, Trisha Anderson, FBI lawyer who normally signed off on all FISAs, says that Sally and McCabe approved the Carter Page FISA before it ever landed on Anderson's desk. How credible is it, then--given the centrality of the Steele material to that FISA--that Sally was truly unwitting regarding Ohr's role? Was it the case that her putative lack of knowledge was maintained because she was the Acting AG during the early part of the Trump administration and was continuing to collude with Jim Comey? But now the plot, with all its moving parts, is becoming harder to conceal. Those earlier denials could come back and bite certain people where they would least like to be bitten.
UPDATE: I hope I wasn't overly coy in this post. What I'm suggesting that we should take from Solomon's reporting--as well as from what we already know--is that Barr/Durham may be targeting Sally Yates. She's in a really tough spot, IMO, not only because of her centrality to the original and first renewal FISAs on Carter Page, but also because of her role in the frame-up of General Flynn. If others start talking, she could be looking at some real serious felony charges: Defrauding the federal government of honest services, Conspiracy to do the same, Obstruction of justice, false statements on the FISAs, false statements to investigators. I'm quite sure this is not a happy time for Long Tall Sally. Recall how she was gonna be a Dem political star? Not so much. I'll bet she's spending a lot of time framing scenarios on how she stays out of jail. I'm equally certain that, from what she's been hearing about Jeffrey Epstein, she knows she wouldn't like jail at all. But who does she have to offer up?
The evidence trail for rampant criminality in the Obama era DOJ/FBI/CIA is so overwhelming that you don't have to be a Perry Mason in order to conduct a prosecution. Normally, in large difficult RICO cases, you start will low level players and then work your way up the chain of command. If that were the case with RussiaGate, we likely would have seen a few indictment by now. In a few rare instances, the whole operation can be discerned from acquired evidence (frequently wiretaps or financial records), and then a mass arrest is conducted (sweep). The latter may be what Barr/Durham has planned. Let's hope so. And sooner please. The Deep State bag of tricks is not empty. They are now trying to crash the economy using a bully pulpit.
ReplyDeletePerry Mason? Perry Como could croon it out perfectly
DeleteSundance has suggested that Ohr was acting on behalf of "the small group", which needed to make sure that Steele still was sticking to the story told in the Dossier.
ReplyDeleteI think Sundance is merely speculating -- is not providing some insider's knowledge. In any case, it's an interesting explanation of Ohr's continuing meetings with Steele.
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Solomon's article raises the question of what lessons DOJ/FBI should learn from this affair.
One mistake was that the FBI never compelled Steele to identify his sources. On that basis alone, the FBI should have cut off Steele early in its investigation.
Another mistake was to concoct evidence -- the framing of Papadopoulos and Carter -- to justify a FISA warrant. In this regard, the worst scandal was that the FBI used that warrant to collect communications of Trump's supporters and associates. About that collection, the public still knows nothing at all.
Another mistake was that the FBI used public policy issues -- such as the Republican Party's discussion at its convention about about policies affecting Russia and Ukraine -- as evidence that Trump was being controlled by the Kremlin.
Yeah, coming from Solomon that sounds surprisingly naive. The real lesson to be learned is--how do we prevent DoJ/FBI from being taken over by lawless radicals? Good luck answering that one.
DeleteI'm afraid that the pertinent lesson many in Deep State are taking away is that they tried to finesse it too much. The level/extent of cover from Journo.Inc will inspire them to be more ruthless next time around, and there will be a next time.
DeleteTom S.
The counter-intelligence specialty tends to become paranoid. It's an occupational hazard.
DeleteIt's a specialty that is necessary, but it has to be controlled and restricted. In particular, this specialty cannot be allowed to do unreasonable searches and seizures.
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The hatred of Comey, Brennan and Clapper toward Trump was intense. Maintaining objectivity is an important element of professionalism in the Intelligence field.
The fact that the leaders of these three agencies became so obsessed by their personal hatred of Trump was a factor in this fiasco.
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Andrew McCabe deserves special blame. His initiation of a counter-intelligence investigation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions was crazy.
I think that McCabe's initiation of that investigation of Sessions was a turning point. Officials who knew about it realized that nobody was safe from McCabe.
Mike, I agree that opening the CI investigation on Sessions clearly showed that McCabe is mentally unbalanced. A nut.
DeleteTom, that gets to the real issue--the only way to stop this from happening again is four more years and a serious purge.
Of course, Yates was fully informed by Ohr.
ReplyDeleteYates and Ohr both are perjurers.
See my Update. Yes, I think their lies are catching up with them.
DeleteBeing contrarian here... I could see Sally Yates as uninformed by Ohr--the less she knew the better so they (the hoax players, Comey, Brennan, Fusion/Steele, et al.) could use her. They needed her to sign off on the FISA application, while keeping her in the dark protected her and kept those in-the-know to as small a circle as possible.
ReplyDeleteThese sorts of ops need limit who knows what, keep many in the dark, rely on peripheral others to trust the secrecy and confidentiality has a purpose, and unwittingly go along.
I'm just speedballing the idea. I've no reason one way or the other on Yates--she seems perfectly capable of being a very partisan player. But not everyone needs to be in-the-loop.
That's fine, but she still has to justify Ohr getting a 100% increase in his bonus. There had to have been a reason, and my reading of Solomon's article is that whoever brought this to his attention is saying that that's what Durham is looking at. Matt Whitaker spoke with Gregg Jarrett last night and he indicated that Durham is honing in on Bruce and Nellie. I'm quite confident that the question of the bonus and who justified it and why is part of that.
DeleteYes, deniability can be plausible, until it's not.
DeleteTom S.
Well, discretionary bonuses seem ripe for corruption, as it is. It would be fortuitous (ironic?) if the bonus cracked open evidence of complicity in the hoax.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, "I doubled his bonus for keeping me in the dark" is hard to swallow...
As usual, they're looking for something that required documentation, so they can pinpoint a false statement or an omission--fraud that can be documented. The requirement for documenting the bonus is what would lead them to examine that, once they realized there was anything at all unusual (the doubling).
Delete