The Bell Finally Tolls for the FBI
|
© 2024 Matt Taibbi The nomination of Kash Patel means chickens are coming home to roost for the FBI, which needs to be destroyed as a political entity
From CNN’s “Trump announces he intends to replace current FBI director with loyalist Kash Patel”:
What’s a “loyalist”? How many presidents nominate “disloyalists” to fill senior positions? Why do sites like Axios continue to complain that Donald Trump has picked “yet another hardline MAGA ally” to occupy a key spot? Who the hell else is he supposed to pick? After everything that’s taken place, it’s unsafe for Trump to do anything but bonfire the whole FBI leadership structure, including probably the entire National Security and Counterintelligence Divisions, for starters. Control over the FBI is the critical test of how real any coming changes will be. In the last eight-plus years, the Bureau went beyond the excesses of the J. Edgar Hoover era, attempting to install itself as a KGB-like domestic intelligence service with gatekeeping power over everything from the White House to the speech landscape. Forget Trump: we are not safe unless its bureaucracy is fully dismantled. As for CNN: for the network to shudder about what a “frightening” choice Patel is without mentioning its own role in his story ought to be a shock, but it’s sadly par for the course. Coverage of the “controversial classified memo” Patel helped author may be exhibit A in the case against the “dishonest fake news media,” a description CNN’s gesticulator-in-chief Jim Acosta denounced as “out of control” and part of Trump’s “assaults on the truth.” The network spent more than a year attacking this “Nunes memo,” through reports that were themselves frequently proven wrong, with a few venturing into the realm of outright hoaxes. Industry coverage of the episode collectively represents perhaps the most egregious still-unacknowledged error of the Trump years, a story botched in quantity. No one performed worse than Acosta’s CNN:
THE GREAT FACEPLANT? A sample of CNN’s copious coverage of the “Nunes memo.” These are all different stories, even if they have the same illustrations in some cases. A “Hamilton 68” article is in the top right corner I defy anyone from CNN to defend its pile of misses on this subject, which collectively read not as journalism but free advertising for Democrats and the FBI. This episode was so shameful, it blurred the lines between the press and a corrupt federal police force. At minimum, the smug mass errors by stations like CNN were Trump’s best campaign ads. Anderson Cooper, can you defend it? Wolf Blitzer? Brian Stelter? Chris Cillizza, who wrote some of CNN’s copy on this? Anyone? Could even recently departed Chris Wallace justify unacknowledged “mistakes” on this scale? To recap: The memo was released before Robert Mueller issued his deflating final report, when press and law enforcement alike were still on a manic upswing about the Russiagate scandal. During this period American mass culture openly salivated at the prospect of unseating a new president it hated, with former defenders of civil liberties cheering domestic surveillance and scoffing at everything from attorney-client privilege to the presumption of innocence. Stephen Colbert in 2008 lampooned revelations that the NSA was listening to Americans, noting just one percent of serving military spoke languages of “critical importance” to national security. “It’s a lot easier to listen to Americans. They speak English,” he cracked. Nine years later, when another story built atop warrantless spying broke in the form of the Trump-Russia scandal, a giddy Colbert raced to the Moscow Ritz-Carlton to jump up and down like a toddler on the “pee-pee” bed. The FBI by then knew this tale had no factual basis (see below), but kept quiet as pee-mania took America by storm. The clip was symbolic of where our cultural mainstream had moved intellectually: The pee story gave the Russia scandal box office appeal, but the hardcore report that sent the news business into a moral frenzy was an April 11, 2017 Washington Post story claiming the secret FISA court approved surveillance on onetime Trump aide Carter Page. From that decision, the paper deduced the FISA court must have ruled Page was an “agent of a foreign power.” The Post through other reports (“How Hard is it To Get an Intelligence Wiretap? Pretty Hard”) had already primed audiences to understand any revelations of this type as proof of unsavory communication with Russians, i.e. “more than just talking to, say, the Russian ambassador.” Senior FBI officials knew the Page warrant application was dirty, but again kept quiet as networks like CNN and outlets like Foreign Policy used leaked documents and whispers by “officials” and “people familiar with the matter” to drive a panic about Trump hiring someone a court ruled “knowingly” worked for the Russians. This helped take the FBI’s flatlined “Crossfire Hurricane” probe to the next level, as Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 appointed Robert Mueller as a Special Counsel to investigate “links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” Patel was one of the only Justice Department officials willing to publicly break from enforcement consensus about all this at a time when virtually everyone considered the Mueller probe a Watergate-like supernova destined to consume the presidency. Even Alan Dershowitz proclaimed Mueller’s final report likely to be “devastating” to Trump. For Patel to bail on the Justice Department and question Mueller took courage that apparently all of his DOJ colleagues lacked. Mueller and his tortoise-faced, bottomlessly self-regarding henchman Andrew Weissman seemed inclined to indict anyone who came within earshot of the Trump-Russia story, making developing witnesses a chore. As one of just a handful of reporters who visited HPSCI offices during this time, I can testify the place was like a locked room in a zombie movie. While Amazon sold “Mueller Time” t-shirts and R2-D2-themed “Help us, Robert Mueller, you’re our only hope” shot glasses, pretty much the only people interested in Patel’s investigation were people looking to spike it. It’s only because Nunes was the elected head of a subpoena armed-Congressional committee that Patel and his team were even able to start to puncture Russiagate’s myths. Based largely on material from the FBI’s original “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, the Nunes/Patel memo made a series of accusations instantly deemed heretical, including:
It’s impossible to overstate how violent the response was to these allegations. The Washington Post called the memo a “joke” and a “sham.” Nancy Pelosi called the memo “bogus,” “false,” and a “total misrepresentation.” Senate Intel chief and Virginia Democrat Mark Warner called it a “reckless” document demonstrating “astonishing disregard for the truth.” CNN cheered as fired FBI Director Jim Comey “skewered” Patel for “dishonest and misleading” work that “inexcusably exposed the classified investigation of an American citizen,” a complaint that took balls considering it was Comey’s FBI that dirtied Carter Page in the first place. New California Senator-elect Adam Schiff wrote a Washington Post editorial saying Nunes had crossed a “dangerous line,” while still-FBI director Christopher Wray and then-Acting Attorney General Rosenstein issued an extraordinary “rare public warning” to Trump, as CNN put it, saying they had “grave concerns” about “material omissions of fact” in the memo. Virtually at the moment the “rare public warning” was issued, CNN sent Acosta, the FBI’s unofficial Chihuahua, to pull his yip-from-afar routine at Trump: “Mr. President, any response to the FBI saying in that statement that the Nunes memo should not be released? Mr. President, any response to the FBI?” There’s no good video, but Acosta proudly tweeted:
A little less than a month later, the ranking Democrat on the Intel Committee, Schiff, put out his own “memo,” ostensibly to rebut the Nunes/Patel report. In hindsight, this “Schiff memo” is incredible. It asserts the FBI “did not ‘abuse’” the FISA process, made only “narrow” use of Steele’s sources, didn’t omit “material facts” about Steele’s background, and used a “rigorous” process to vet Steele before using his information, using “multiple independent sources” to corroborate his reporting. It added that the resulting FISA taps generated “valuable” intelligence, and that Steele’s prior work had been used in “criminal proceedings.” This memo was slobbered over by media as a searing knockout blow, with Vox proclaiming Schiff “brought receipts” in tearing the Nunes report “apart.” CNN and Jake Tapper welcomed Schiff on to insist the FBI “acted appropriately” and is “not part of some deep state”: Public belief that Schiff was right and Nunes wrong was so pervasive that the biggest debate in both politics and media was whether the absolute proof of Trump’s collusion with Russia was in the Trump-negotiated redactions of Schiff’s memo, or if it would come out later in Mueller’s final judgment. An NPR report was typical, saying the main takeaway from the “memo mania” was that the FBI had corroborated “parts” of the Steele dossier. “Which parts? That is blacked out,” they wrote, insisting the unknown corroboration was “significant” nonetheless. About a year and a half after this madness, on December 9, 2019, Justice Department Inspector General and Barack Obama appointee Michael Horowitz released a 478-page report on the conduct of the FBI (and other agencies) in the FISA matter, titled “Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation.” It was a brutal document. Horowitz worded findings in a way that left no doubt that Patel and Nunes nailed their key conclusions. For instance, the Washington Post piece that derided the Nunes memo as a “joke” and a “sham” scoffed at the Patel report’s claim that the Steele report played an “essential part” in obtaining FISA authority. But Horowitz doubled down on that exact language, calling the Steele reports “central and essential.” He verified that the FBI double-cited Steele via the Yahoo! report, with Isikoff himself owning the fact. “The article’s author,” Horowitz wrote, “has confirmed that Steele contributed information for the article and… was the ‘Western intelligence source.’” Regarding “alleged abuses,” at least one FBI official in Kevin Clinesmith has been convicted already for offenses related to this affair, adding “not a source” to an email to hide the fact that Page was an informant in good standing with the CIA during all of this nonsense. Horowitz likewise confirmed that Steele was “closed for cause” for talking to the media and quoted Steele’s case agent as saying his work had “never been used in a criminal proceeding.” As for Steele’s ties to the DNC and the Clinton campaign, Horowitz wrote that “by no later than November 21, 2016, [FBI attorney Bruce] Ohr had advised FBI officials that Steele’s reporting had been given to the Hillary Clinton campaign (among other entities) and that Steele was ‘desperate’ that Trump not be elected.” He added that the FBI failed to update a description of Steele after it became known to investigators that Steele’s contractor, Glenn Simpson, was “hired by someone associated with the Democratic Party and/or the DNC.” Horowitz shot down Schiff’s claim that the FBI had found “multiple independent sources” to corroborate Steele’s information, noting Steele’s reports not only didn’t support a claim of collusion, but contained “inaccurate” allegations that were “inconsistent” with the FBI’s own findings. The latter detail is crucial because none of the ten billion FBI sources who leaked to the media during this time period ever warned a reporter away from Steele’s goofball claims. The IG made a point of noting that “much” of the “limited” information Steele did get right was “publicly available”:
From the Horowitz report. Horowitz even cavity-searched the “pee tape” story, telling the world what any national police force with any sense of allegiance to the office of the presidency should have the minute the Steele report got out: that the tale was disputed by its own source, who was stunned to hear Steele describe it as “confirmed”:
This was information the FBI learned in January 2017, shortly after now-defunct Buzzfeed published the dossier. The instant that story hit the public the Bureau did what every news organization that did all those slavish New Yorker-style portraits of Christopher Steele should have done, demanding to know exactly where Steele’s bullshit came from. It bears reminding that the public only found out just how bogus the Steele reports were because a handful of savvy Internet sleuths pieced together the name of Steele’s primary source, Igor Danchenko. How corrupt are the FBI sources and figures like Senator Mark Warner who complained to the New York Times about this detective work? Check out this passage from “The F.B.I. Pledged to Keep a Source Anonymous. Trump Allies Aided His Unmasking”:
Apart from insinuating that these researchers were aiding the Russians, this piece by Adam Goldman and Charlie Savage quoted people like a former F.B.I. assistant director for counterterrorism named James W. McJunkin in saying the “Sleuth’s Corner” had “put witnesses at risk.” It cited Warner in suggesting they “likely put [Danchenko] and other sources in Russia’s sights.” This was a shameless lie, given that the whole point of the Danchenko story was he had not revealed Russian secrets at all, but rather pulled a pile of unconfirmable rumors out of his backside and fed them to Steele, who added his own embellishments. Like the Nunes/Patel memo, these revelations didn’t put witnesses at risk, but they did pose enormous risks for the FBI, whose “sources and methods” were revealed to be a politicized cock-and-bull scheme. If you’re keeping score, Nunes/Patel were right about everything, and new Senator Schiff was wrong about everything. The Horowitz report should have ended scores of careers, both in law enforcement and media. When testifying, Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said the report “made me want to heave,” adding, “I thought I had dropped acid. It’s surreal.” He went on to say, “It’s easier to divorce your spouse around here than it is to get fired… at least in the FBI.” Of course, Kennedy is a Republican. But when he closed his questioning by saying the situation had to be fixed and someone needed firing, Horowitz eagerly offered his own thoughts. “Agree completely,” he said. “There’s got to be a change in the culture also.” Note Horowitz’s quip about not being sure the FBI teams investigating Trump were peopled with “Mensa material”:  Despite this, the Horowitz report with the universal assistance of national media was sold to the public as confirmation that the starting of the original Trump-Russia probe was “justified,” with reports joyously quoting a Horowitz line about it having been “opened for an authorized purpose.” However, the fact that the curious circumstances surrounding the opening of the “Crossfire Hurricane” case in July of 2016 were not provably illegal shouldn’t have obscured the other 470-plus pages of damning conclusions. Horowitz himself shot down attempts to characterize his report as a vindication of the FBI. When Vermont Democrat Pat Leahy tried to suggest the report showed “no evidence that the investigation was motivated by anti-Trump or political bias,” Horowitz quickly interrupted. “We found no evidence that the initiation of the investigation was motivated by political bias,” he quipped. “It gets murkier — the question gets more challenging, senator — when you get to the FISA.” The report bears this out. Two sentences after the “authorized purpose” line, the IG started listing investigative problems, noting concerns about the FBI’s acceleration into “more intrusive investigative techniques” like FISA and sending informants (read: spies) to talk to Trump associates. Ultimately what that report showed is that the FBI in its zeal to get Trump not only embraced a concocted story about collusion with Russia, it sat on exculpatory evidence through years of leaks while engineering scheme after sordid scheme to knock out a sitting president. This planet-scaled dirty trick was without precedent and may be difficult to criminally prosecute, since “changing reality for political reasons” is not in the federal code. However you define what the FBI did, the press was clearly an accomplice. Absent a pre-inauguration decision to “brief” Trump about Russia’s alleged ability to blackmail him, a notion based entirely on the Steele nonsense, the “Crossfire Hurricane” probe likely would’ve collapsed, and there never would have been a Mueller probe. Instead, FBI Director Jim Comey and three other intelligence chiefs did the “briefing,” news of which was more or less immediately leaked to CNN, triggering a series of events leading to Buzzfeed’s infamous publication days later. With the aid of multiple U.S. Senators, the press also blindly repeated the Hamilton 68 think tank’s false claims that the #releasethememo campaign hyping Patel’s report was tied to “Russian bots.” There is almost no end to these squalid episodes. It’s necessary to lay all this out today because the “Nunes memo” backlash was the most irrefutably corrupt episode from the Trump-Russia years, and explains the impossibility of leaving participants like Chris Wray in place. The FBI absolutely should stand up to a president who is, in fact, breaking the law. But what this version of the Bureau did was invent from thin air a pretext for an open-ended investigation that paralyzed the legitimate government, essentially moving power for years to a White House-in-exile under Robert Mueller. I’ll leave it to lawyers to decide what the proper word to describe that conduct should be, but I know what that looks like to me as a voter. The FBI should get out of politics and go back to investigating crime, and it won’t do that until everyone connected to capers like the one above has been at least sent to the private sector, if not somewhere less hospitable. No matter what you think of Trump, the FBI became a criminal organization under his tenure, and defanging it will be an urgent priority of the next government.
|
