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Friday, January 10, 2020

CORRECTION?

Yesterday I did a post: Why Did The FBI Stop Documenting Its Contacts With Chris Steele? However, on p. 226 of Lee Smith's The Plot Against The President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History. we read this:

After the special counsel team was named May 17, Steele told Ohr he wanted to spek with the Mueller team. 
Ohr continued to meet with the FBI at the Bureau's request, as Steele's cutout, until late November 2017. The 302s of the post-May 2017 meetings were held in the custody of the special counsel and never disclosed to Congress.

From this account--deriving, one assumes, from Congressional sources--it appears that 302s of the contacts between Steele and Team Mueller--as filtered through Bruce Ohr--were in fact created, but that their existence was not disclosed to Congressional investigators. In other words, the FBI agents working for Team Mueller's Office of the Special Counsel continued contact with Steele as before--using Bruce Ohr as the intermediary, since Steele had been closed as a Bureau source for cause. What DIDN'T happen is that Team Mueller did not disclose those contacts to Congress.

However, on p. 284/324 of the Horowitz Dossier we read something quite different:

On May 8, 2017, Ohr told SSA 4 and Case Agent 5 that Steele was willing to work with the FBI again. Ohr said that Steele had independently raised with Ohr the subject of re-engaging with the FBI. On May 12, 2017, SSA 4 requested that Ohr ask Steele if he was willing to meet with FBI agents in Europe. According to Ohr, he contacted Steele, who agreed to talk with the FBI agents on May 15, 2017. This meeting did not take place, and, as discussed in Chapter Six, the FBI did not have contact with Steele until September 2017 when he was interviewed by agents assigned to the Special Counsel's Office. Ohr told us he continued to communicate with Steele through the end of November 2017 and provided the details of those communications to the FBI, which primarily focused on Steele's interest in being interviewed by the Special Counsel. However, 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. Ohr told us that Steele stopped contacting him after Ohr's name appeared in news articles at the end of 2017.

How to resolve this? I can't on my own. My guess is that what Team Mueller retained were Ohr's notes and/or printouts/copies of their communications using "an encrypted electronic forum." (p. 283/323) These notes/communications would not be actual FD-302s that would be placed in official FBI files. The point is that if the FBI was conducting official investigative actions--and they had, according to Horowitz, reached out to Steele through Ohr--then they should have been memorializing those contacts. Instead, they were hiding those contacts from official reporting channels. The only way those contacts were discovered was because Ohr coughed up his own notes and other documentation to OIG. The reasons Team Mueller had for concealing all this remains as described in my original post.

Here's the bottom line: Officials of the US Government do NOT conduct private investigations. Their investigative activity MUST be reported as required by the internal regulations of the agency in question and MUST be maintained in a form that can be recovered. It's a permanent record.

6 comments:

  1. I sense a pattern of misleading conduct, a failure to follow procedures and guidelines... Quelle surprise!

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    1. I suspect it's just the tip of the iceberg. Remember how limited Horowitz's jurisdiction was.

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    2. As the peeling of the Russia hoax and coup onion continues, layer after layer, the resulting network of players (SSA 4, Case Agent 5) engaged in the activities associated with the corrupt investigation becomes mind-boggling large...

      As you note, the OIG's limited scope means there are CIA players yet to make an appearance on the stage.

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    3. I have one more "recommended read" post to finish before I embark on an extended transcript that I hope will be informative. It's by far not just the CIA at issue in all this. None of this, NONE of this, could have happened without the active help of DoJ.

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  2. "Anytime an FBI agent, to include the director, collects information in an official capacity, that information must be documented, associated with a case file number and entered into the FBI’s case management system."

    —Kevin Brock, former FBI assistant director of intelligence

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    1. That's it. Running private investigations is a firing offense, possible criminal. But here's the thing. You can't tell me that the Mueller prosecutors weren't aware of this, and didn't do things just as bad.

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