Kevin Brock Dissects Strzok's CH Opening EC

Predication. It's impossible to stress the importance of this concept too much when evaluating the attempted lawfare coup against President Trump that we know as the Russia Hoax. Kevin Brock, a former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI, has a fine article at The Hill today in which he walks through the Strzok Opening EC for Crossfire Hurricane. We covered this in The Crossfire Hurricane Opening EC--Predication And The Way Forward. Brock provides additional perspective that I believe most will find informative. In fact, his article, New FBI document confirms the Trump campaign was investigated without justification, works well as a followup to Gregg Jarrett's interview article with John Dowd. Whereas Dowd focuses on the responsibility of key prosecutors--Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller--Brock looks at the document that those prosecutors would ultimately have had to rely upon. If they had been men of integrity, not intent on framing and removing the president. Stylisticly, I find the opening paragraph very strong:

Late last week the FBI document that started the Trump-Russia collusion fiasco was publicly released. It hasn’t received a lot of attention but it should, because not too long from now this document likely will be blown up and placed on an easel as Exhibit A in a federal courtroom. 

The prosecutor, U.S. Attorney John Durham, will rightly point out that the document that spawned three years of political misery fails to articulate a single justifiable reason for starting the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation.   

Those of us who have speculated there was insufficient cause for beginning the investigation could not have imagined the actual opening document was this feeble. It is as if it were written by someone who had no experience as an FBI agent. 

Keep in mind the FBI cannot begin to investigate anyone, especially a U.S. citizen or entity, without first creating a document that lists the reasonably suspicious factors that would legally justify the investigation. ... 

... 

In a normal EC opening a FARA case, we should expect to see a list of reasons why the FBI believes individuals associated with a U.S. presidential campaign had been engaged by the Russian government to represent and advocate that government’s goals. 

This, however, was no normal EC. Try as we might to spot them, those reasons are not found anywhere in the document. ...  

... 

Strzok apparently took ... nebulous reporting by Downer and then leapt to the dubious conclusion that Papadopoulos and unnamed others were engaged by the Russians to act as foreign agents on Russia’s behalf. This, despite Downer also offering two exculpatory statements in the same email: 1) It was “unclear” how the Trump campaign might have reacted to the Russian claims and 2) the Russians likely were going to do what they were going to do with the information whether anyone in the Trump campaign cooperated with them or not.

Strzok then concludes the EC by moving the goalposts. He writes that Crossfire Hurricane is being opened to determine if unspecified “individual(s)” associated with the Trump campaign are “witting of and/or coordinating activities” — also unspecified — “with the Government of Russia.” He doesn’t even mention Papadopoulos. 

Ultimately, there was no attempt by Strzok to articulate any factors that address the elements of FARA. He couldn’t, because there are none. ...

What this FBI document clearly establishes is that Crossfire Hurricane was an illicit, made-up investigation lacking a shred of justifying predication, ...

This document will be the key to the big picture conspiracy prosecution that Durham is preparing. Every FBI and DoJ official who handled any aspect of the Russia Hoax investigations can be held responsible for failing to question the overwhelmingly obvious lack of predication to the investigation. But that responsibility reaches critical mass, as John Dowd stresses, when we reach the level of Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller. They should not be allowed to walk.