According to most of the sources, no one in the FBI at a GS-14 level or higher is safe from losing their job after Mr. Trump
is sworn in, and they fully expect the president-elect to “smash the
place to pieces when he gets in,” and that it will be a “bloodbath.”
Former FBI whistleblower George Hill told The Washington Times that people in the agency say the current state of the FBI is “frazzled.”
“I have friends still at the Bureau telling me that no less than 50
Senior Executives (SES) are scrambling to retire ASAP,” he said.
A 63-page report released last month found "numerous issues" with the
FBI's use of confidential sources during a period that included the
2016 election. That report revealed that the FBI lacked appropriate
procedures to vet and maintain oversight of sources like the ones used
against the Trump campaign. This created a security risk for the United
States. Yet no prosecutions have been announced.
Last August, an even more serious finding was released when the IG
determined that the FBI director himself [James Comey] had violated FBI policy and the
terms of his own employment agreement in disseminating classified
information for release to the media. Though the DOJ could have
prosecuted based on the report's findings, it declined to do so.
A May 2019 IG report implicated the FBI deputy assistant director for
unauthorized contacts with the media, illegally disclosing sealed court
documents and other sensitive information to the media, and accepting
gifts from the media. The DOJ declined to prosecute. But why? The IG
recommended prosecution.
The IG's June 2018 probe into the Hillary Clinton email investigation
implicated the FBI's head of counterintelligence, Peter Strzok, of
repeatedly articulating a strong political bias even as he headed up the
investigation of Clinton's exposure of classified information. The
500-page report, which reviewed 1.2 million documents and included
interviews with more than 100 witnesses, documented numerous
questionable decisions that benefited Clinton or damaged Trump, though
the IG acknowledged the parties denied their political bias impacted
their decisions.
Finally, an April 2018 report implicated FBI Assistant Director
Andrew McCabe of inappropriately authorizing the disclosure of sensitive
information to a reporter and repeatedly lying to investigators about
it. The report found McCabe lied four times, three under oath, and that
it was done "in a manner designed to advance his personal interests at
the expense of Department leadership." Though McCabe was fired, he
wasn't prosecuted.
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan had ordered
the special counsel to turn over all government documents and
“memoranda” related to the questioning of Flynn, after his attorneys
claimed the FBI had discouraged him from bringing a lawyer to his
fateful Jan. 24, 2017 interview with agents at the White House. ...
Apart
from a new memo from Mueller's team defending the FBI's handling of the
interview -- and saying nothing about the way it was conducted “caused
the defendant to make false statements to the FBI” -- the filing
included a January 2017 memo on Flynn from then-FBI Deputy Director
Andrew McCabe and a "302" (a document memorializing
interviews) detailing a July 19, 2017 interview with then-FBI agent
Peter Strzok. Strzok, one of two agents who interviewed Flynn, described
that meeting in the document, filed Aug. 22 of that year.
But not included in the filing was an original 302 from the period of the January 2017 Flynn interview.
It's
unclear whether the document exists. However, the Strzok interview file
appeared to repeatedly refer to a 302 drafted after the Flynn
interview. "Strzok conducted the interview and [REDACTED] was primarily
responsible for taking notes and writing the FD-302," one section said.
Another said that throughout the interview, Flynn did not give any
indication of deception and only hedged once, "which they documented in
the 302."
James Trusty, a former senior Justice Department
official who now works as a criminal defense attorney at Ifrah Law,
predicted Sullivan would notice that the 302 submitted Friday is dated
seven months after the Flynn interview took place.
“Judge Sullivan
has a well-established history of taking on discovery issues head-on,”
Trusty said. “So providing a seven-month-old FBI 302 is absolutely going
to be a red flag for the judge, and I can’t imagine there are not going
to be questions tomorrow about whether there are contemporaneous notes,
or a contemporaneous report, that is in the FBI’s possession.” ...
Strzok was removed from the Russia probe in late July 2017 -- just
days after he apparently gave the interview that formed the basis for
the 302 in Mueller's filing -- for his apparent anti-Trump bias. No
audio recording or other documentation of Flynn's comments to the FBI
have been produced. ...
Last week, Comey was asked how the FBI agents ended up at the White
House to interview Flynn in the first place. Comey’s response provided
new details about the circumstances that fueled criticism of the
bureau’s conduct:
“I sent them,” Comey said in a panel discussion
with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, and added that it was “something I
probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a
more…organized administration.”
The interview was arranged directly with Flynn, he explained, acknowledging this was not standard procedure.
Rosenstein should be fired immediately. Proposing to secretly record the president is, at the very least, a violation of regulations that govern a security clearance.
Oh yeah, that'll be helpful on November 6th. Let's fire the guy that fired Comey and make ourselves look completely insane.
There's plenty of time to fire Rod Rosenstein starting on November 7th.
Jarrett should listen to Mark Levin's argument. It was Comey ally Andrew McCabe who pressured Rosenstein to appoint the special counsel in the wake of the firing of James Comey. Rosenstein placated him by appointing Comey ally Robert Mueller. The Comey allies are behind this leak, seeking to weaken Trump.
Rosenstein is the monkey in the middle. The leak against him in the Times is a sign that he is no longer useful to the Trump opposition. It's also a sign that the Trump opposition is getting very desperate in the wake of Trump's declassification order, the results of which are going to take at least another week.
Perhaps Rosenstein will look better now to his future in the Trump administration. He was once useful to Trump by firing crooked Comey. He could be helpful again now that he's been chastised by his former "colleagues".
Mr. McCabe, who was later fired from the F.B.I., declined to comment. His memos have been turned over to the special counsel investigating whether Trump associates conspired with Russia’s election interference, Robert S. Mueller III, according to a lawyer for Mr. McCabe. “A set of those memos remained at the F.B.I. at the time of his departure in late January 2018,” the lawyer, Michael R. Bromwich, said of his client. “He has no knowledge of how any member of the media obtained those memos.” ...
One week after the firing [of Comey], Mr. Rosenstein met with Mr. McCabe and at least four other senior Justice Department officials, in part to explain his role in the situation.
During their discussion, Mr. Rosenstein expressed frustration at how Mr. Trump had conducted the search for a new F.B.I. director, saying the president was failing to take the candidate interviews seriously. A handful of politicians and law enforcement officials, including Mr. McCabe, were under consideration.
To Mr. Rosenstein, the hiring process was emblematic of broader dysfunction stemming from the White House. He said both the process and the administration itself were in disarray, according to two people familiar with the discussion.
Mr. Rosenstein then raised the idea of wearing a recording device or “wire,” as he put it, to secretly tape the president when he visited the White House. One participant asked whether Mr. Rosenstein was serious, and he replied animatedly that he was.
If not him, then Mr. McCabe or other F.B.I. officials interviewing with Mr. Trump for the job could perhaps wear a wire or otherwise record the president, Mr. Rosenstein offered. White House officials never checked his phone when he arrived for meetings there, Mr. Rosenstein added, implying it would be easy to secretly record Mr. Trump.
The suggestion itself was remarkable. While informants or undercover agents regularly use concealed listening devices to surreptitiously gather evidence for federal investigators, they are typically targeting drug kingpins and Mafia bosses in criminal investigations, not a president viewed as ineffectively conducting his duties.
In the end, the idea went nowhere, the officials said. But they called Mr. Rosenstein’s comments an example of how erratically he was behaving while he was taking part in the interviews for a replacement F.B.I. director, considering the appointment of a special counsel and otherwise running the day-to-day operations of the more than 100,000 people at the Justice Department.
Mr. Rosenstein’s suggestion about the 25th Amendment was similarly a sensitive topic. The amendment allows for the vice president and majority of cabinet officials to declare the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
Merely conducting a straw poll, even if Mr. Kelly and Mr. Sessions were on board, would be risky if another administration official were to tell the president, who could fire everyone involved to end the effort.
Shortly before last year’s election, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe wrote an email on his official government account stating that the Hillary Clinton email probe had been given “special” status, according to documents released Wednesday.
McCabe’s Oct. 23, 2016, email to press officials in the FBI said the probe was under the control of a small group of high-ranking people at the FBI’s headquarters in Washington.
“As I now know the decision was made to investigate it at HQ with a small team,” McCabe wrote in the email. He said he had no input when the Clinton email investigation started in summer 2015, while he was serving as assistant director in charge of the FBI's Washington office.
“[The Washington office] provided some personnel for the effort but it was referred to as a ‘special’ and I was not given any details about it,” he wrote.
