Brian Auten And The Russia Hoax Big Picture

Paul Sperry--banned for life from Twitter--has a terrific investigative article today that goes into just about anything you'd like to know about current high level FBI analyst Brian Auten's involvement in the Russian Hoax. Sperry focuses most closely on Auten's involvement with the Steele Dossier:

Meet the Russiagate Prober Who Couldn't Verify Anything in the Steele Dossier Yet Said Nothing for Years

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations

March 30, 2021

I won't attempt to go through the wealth of detail that Sperry has on offer, which is greatly enhanced by his reference to Auten's testimony to Senate Judiciary staffers just last October. Here's a thumbnail summary of what Auten knew no later than January, 2017. In reading what follows, bear in mind that Auten was and is a Supervisory Intelligence Analyst, meaning, he has his own team of analysts at his beck and call:

1. Auten knew that the Steele "dossier" had been funded by the Hillary campaign.

2. Auten knew that nothing--repeat, NOTHING--in the Steele "dossier" that wasn't already public information had been verified or corroborated, despite the representations in that regard that were made to the FISA Court (FISC).

3. Not only that, but Auten knew that Steele was feeding the FBI "bullsh*t" in the "dossier"--supposed facts that Auten was able to debunk. That includes the claim that Michael Cohen had traveled to Prague.

4. Auten would also have been aware of the allegations being made against Carter Page--allegations that were a tissue of falsehoods. I can personally not imagine any scenario in which Auten would have been unaware of the falsity of those allegations--despite his claim that all Crossfire Hurricane investigations were justified. What would you expect him to say, with Carter Page suing?

5. Auten, of course, shared this information with the rest of the Crossfire Hurricane team. He also made no objections when this BS was knowingly submitted--repeatedly--to the FISC as if it were reliable information that satisfied the FISA requirement for probable cause.

But here's the thing. Very little if anything of this is news to investigators. Most of it was known and documented by Michael Horowitz in his FISA Report (Sperry goes into this). Much of it was probably also known by Congressional investigators, despite the best stonewalling efforts of Rod Rosenstein and Chris Wray, as described by Kash Patel recently. That Auten hasn't been held to account is an obvious outrage, and so Sperry quotes a pair of former FBI agents:

The FBI 'Analyst' At The Heart Of The Russia Hoax

Paul Sperry has a very thorough, and lengthy, article out today that details the role of Brian J. Auten, a Supervisory Intelligence Analyst for the FBI, in enabling the Russia Hoax. Auten was a key player in getting the Carter Page FISA warrants approved as well as being a key contributor to the fraudulent Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA). He was also targeted repeatedly by IG Horowitz' FISA Report. The Sperry article,

FBI Man at the Heart of Surveillance Abuses Is a Professor of Spying Ethics

is too long to attempt to summarize. I'll confine myself here to citing a few examples.

Auten's wrongdoing appears to have involved both failures to disclose necessary information as well as what appear to be outright misstatements:

By January 2017, the lead analyst had ample evidence the dossier was bogus. Auten could not get sources who provided information to Steele to support the dossier’s allegations during interviews. And collections from the wiretaps of Trump aide Carter Page failed to reveal any confirmation of the claims. Auten even came across exculpatory evidence indicating Page was not the Russian asset the dossier alleged, but was in fact a CIA asset helping the U.S. spy on Moscow. 

Nonetheless, he and the FBI continued to use the Steele material as a basis for renewing their FISA monitoring of Page, who was never charged with a crime.

That is very important. In order to renew a FISA, it's necessary to either demonstrate that the FISA has been "productive"--that is, has provided information that confirms the probable cause claims made in the original FISA application--or explain why the FISA had been unproductive to that point and why an renewal would lead to productive results. In addition, of course, a process of reviewing the reliability of past information that was relied upon in obtaining the FISA is also required. Obviously, none of the above occurred with regard to the Carter Page FISA applications, and Auten was a key player in that entire process: