One of the interesting aspects of the IG report is the documented use of personal email by participants within the FBI “small group” Mid-Year-Exam (MYE) team. [pg 424]

One of those documented examples involves FBI Agent Peter Strzok downloading the content of the sealed Anthony Weiner Indictment, October 29, 2016, to his personal email address. Unauthorized extraction of a ‘sealed SDNY indictment‘, and transmission to a non-secure system, is a felony.

(From summary pg vii) We found that Strzok used his personal email accounts for official government business on several occasions, including forwarding an email from his FBI account to his personal email account about the proposed search warrant the Midyear team was seeking on the Weiner laptop.

==> This email included a draft of the search warrant affidavit, which contained information from the Weiner investigation that appears to have been under seal at the time in the Southern District of New York and information obtained pursuant to a grand jury subpoena issued in the Eastern District of Virginia in the Midyear investigation. <==

We refer to the FBI the issue of whether Strzok’s use of personal email accounts violated FBI and Department policies.

Details of this specific example continue on pages 426, 427, 428 and footnotes #217 #218:

[…]  During our review, we identified several instances where Strzok used his personal email account for government business.  […]  Most troubling, on October 29, 2016, Strzok forwarded from his FBI account to his personal email account an email about the proposed search warrant the Midyear team was seeking on the Weiner laptop.

This email included a draft of the search warrant affidavit, which contained information from the Weiner investigation that appears to have been under seal at the time in the Southern District of New York and information obtained pursuant to a grand jury subpoena issued in the Eastern District of Virginia in the Midyear investigation.

The footnotes here are interesting:

fn #217 reads: ” The OIG previously notified the respective U.S. Attorney’s Offices about Strzok’s actions.”

Presumably fn #217 reflects the Office of Inspector General informing the Southern District of New York (sdny) and Eastern District of Virginia (edva) about Strzok downloading sealed Weiner investigation material to a personal email system and presenting abstracts containing that information to EDVA to gain the Huma Abedin laptop search warrant.

fn #218 reads: “We requested access to Strzok’s personal email account. Strzok agreed to produce copies of work-related emails in his personal account but declined to produce copies of his personal emails. Strzok subsequently told the OIG that he had reviewed the emails residing in his personal mailboxes and found no work-related communications. We determined that we lacked legal authority to obtain the contents of Strzok’s personal email account from his email provider, which requires an Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) search warrant to produce email contents. Strzok’s email provider’s policy applies to opened emails and emails stored for more than 180 days, which ECPA otherwise permits the government to obtain using a subpoena and prior notice to the subscriber. See 18 U.S.C. § 2703(a), (b)(1)(B)(i); COMPUTER CRIME AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY SECTION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, SEARCHING AND SEIZING COMPUTERS AND OBTAINING ELECTRONIC EVIDENCE IN CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS at 129-30 (2009). In addition, although we learned that a non-FBI family member had access to Strzok’s personal email account in 2017, Strzok told the OIG that no one else had access to his personal email account during the period in question (i.e., late October 2016).”

(pg 428) We refer to the FBI the issue of whether Strzok’s use of personal email accounts violated FBI and Department policies. As noted above, Page left the Department on May 4, 2018.

Who was the primary stakeholder in the laptop? And who, as a matter of this very specific set of circumstances, did not have any control over the data?

As you consider this seemingly small and innocuous aspect of the IG report…. remember all of the effort that Hillary Clinton’s team put into the control over the information within her email network(s)…. Think about the exhaustive efforts into controlling, deleting, hiding, scrubbing, masking, transferring, bleach-bit wiping, etc. etc.  Three years of exhaustive physical and financial expenditures to ensure the content of the communication network was never retrievable by any investigative authority; millions spent, lawyers paid…. and…

Now fast forward to late 2016…

Think about 675,000 emails and Blackberry communications; “emails dated beginning in 2007 and covering the entire period of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State” [pg 324] just magically appearing in September 2016… and this time, literally, Clinton has no control over them.

Think about it for a few seconds.

Think about the angst.

Think about the potential ramifications.

Think about it from Clinton’s perspective.

Remember, throughout this campaign period her team and the FBI team were working hand-in-glove; a political reciprocity agreement with the Obama White House.

Now consider Page #315:

At 2:30 p.m. on October 26, Midyear FBI personnel, Midyear prosecutors, NYO, and SDNY participated in a conference call about the Weiner laptop. The highest ranking participants for each group on the call were Strzok, Toscas, the NYO A/SAC, and Kim.

The NYO A/SAC, ASAC, SSA, and Weiner case agent all participated in the call. This was the first time that the Weiner case agent had spoken directly with anyone associated with the Midyear investigation.

The case agent told us that he felt he was asked questions about information that he had already reported up the chain of command in September. He stated:

They were asking questions that I had already repeatedly answered in other calls. In other words, people were asking what domains are you seeing? How many emails are you seeing? What do you think you’re seeing? Who are they to, who are they from? What are the domains? Oh, we have that domain? What years? Like, questions that we, I had been asked and either had answered preliminarily, and then we became uncomfortable legally searching for those answers. But these were things that were known to me and had been made known above me for weeks.

The Weiner case agent stated that “the only thing that was new” was that others on the call asked him to speculate on what he had seen. According to the case agent, he stated, “Based on the number of emails, we could have every email that Huma and Hillary ever sent each other. It’s possible, given the pure volume, it’s possible.”

The NYO SSA described the call as “just basically discussions and information about…potentially what…was there, which we still didn’t know because we hadn’t looked at anything.” The A/SAC thought the call was “matter-of-fact” and said it was the first time they were questioned by an NSD lawyer.

According to the A/SAC’s notes, NYO briefed that there were 675,000 emails on the laptop spanning a time period from 2006 to 2016, and stated that there “appears to be blackberry messages” on the laptop.

The FBI’s Midyear team told us that they learned important new information on the call.  Strzok described it as “the triggering event” and FBI Attorney-1 [Tashina Gauhar] stated that this was the “call where it was crystallized to me what was on the laptop.”  (link)

Who were the stakeholders?

Knowing the nature of all FBI investigative benefits-of-doubt previously afforded throughout 2015 and 2016; do you think the FBI DC team didn’t immediately notify Team Clinton directly or through some facilitating channel?

Perhaps the answer to that question outlines why Peter Strzok suddenly found a need to download the sealed SDNY Weiner indictment and transfer it to his personal email?

Curioser and curiouser…

MORE HERE

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https://www.scribd.com/embeds/381806566/content?start_page=1&view_mode=&access_key=key-4WfKaOih0Xm7EA7gdK93

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Regardless of what anyone might think about Paul Manafort individually, the fact that a federal judge is willing to put a white-collar defendant behind bars until trial  is absurd.  Paul Manafort has been charged with tax avoidance and financial crimes stemming from 2006 and 2009. [Detention order pdf below]  Manafort is accused of contacting a possible witness in the case; however, the prosecution refuses to tell Manafort who the witnesses or victims are.  His defense argues that it’s impossible to avoid contact with witnesses when the prosecution won’t tell the court who the witnesses are. So the judge throws him in jail.

Mueller is a rogue agent willing to tear down the constructs of the justice system in order to defend the inherent corruption within his beloved institutions.  Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said today it was “obnoxious to our Constitution” to put former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort behind bars prior to a trial.

“He has never been convicted of anything. He is as innocent as you and I,” Dershowitz said in an interview on MSNBC on Friday. “And the idea of locking somebody up before a trial is so obnoxious to our Constitution that every civil libertarian should be up in arms. What they can do if they think that he’s tampering with witnesses is: They can subject him to home arrest, take away his computer … they can have all kinds of restrictions, but the idea of putting somebody in jail before they’ve been convicted is an enactment of civil liberties.”

Dershowitz comments come after Manafort was taken to a federal jail on Friday after U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson revoked his current bail that permitted him out on house arrest and after he pleaded not guilty to charges of obstruction. He will stay at the federal jail until his trial in September. (read more)

https://www.scribd.com/embeds/381886101/content?start_page=1&view_mode=&access_key=key-TahJ5b3MSuXxWcPhL8cF

One of the information issues with the IG report is that it’s written entirely from an insiders perspective.  Therefore without an understanding of how divisions within Main Justice related to the discussed activity within FBI main DC offices it can be very confusing to understand.

The ‘insider narration’ makes it difficult to see what happened with the Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner laptop; and how the Clinton emails were discovered.  However, because the issue is so important the IG report spends three chapters on this time-frame between September 28th and October 29th, 2016; and ultimately the next day, Oct. 30th, when a search warrant was executed for the laptop content.

IG Horowitz takes this aspect of the investigation into granularity and nuance (Chapters 8, 9 and 10).

At the heart of the activity during this critical period is FBI lawyer #1 Tashina “Tash” Gauhar who was on a video conference call with the FBI New York Field Office (NYFO) as the discoveries of hundreds of thousands of Clinton emails were relayed internally to the Mid-Year-Event (MYE) team in DC on September 29th, 2016.

Almost a full month went by until October 27th, 2016, when the MYE team all gathered with James Comey to talk about the laptop issues and the emails.   Within the IG review of this period, there is a bunch of ass-covering documentation that takes place in hindsight to the events.  The IG is careful to point out each time his investigation is presented with documentary evidence that was clearly written long-after the events being questioned.

The central IG question is: why didn’t the FBI take immediate action to review 725,000 Clinton-centric emails on the Huma/Weiner laptop?  Why did they wait a month before seeking a search warrant?  Why were they doing nothing?

With these three basic questions Horowitz enters a matrix of FBI excuses, obtuse claims, he-said/she-said, and ultimately a bunch of statements by the MYE team that simply didn’t make a lick of sense.  Or put more diplomatically in IG language: “we found most of the explanations offered for this delay to be unconvincing.” (pg. 324)

IG REPORT  pg 324 – By no later than September 29, the FBI had learned virtually every fact that was cited by the FBI in late October as justification for obtaining the search warrant for the Weiner laptop, including that the laptop contained:

• Over 340,000 emails, some of which were from domains associated with Clinton, including state.gov, clintonfoundation.org, clintonemail.com, and hillaryclinton.com;
• Numerous emails between Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin;
• An unknown number of BlackBerry communications on the laptop, including one or more messages between Abedin and Clinton, indicating the possibility that the laptop contained communications from the early months of Clinton’s tenure;178 and
• Emails dated beginning in 2007 and covering the entire period of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State

The IG boiled down the FBI team excuses into four categories.

The explanations given to the OIG for the FBI’s failure to take immediate action on the Weiner laptop fell into four general categories:

1. The FBI Midyear team was waiting for additional information about the contents of the laptop from NYO, which was not provided until late October.

2. The FBI Midyear team could not review the emails without additional legal authority, such as consent or a new search warrant.

3. The FBI Midyear team and senior FBI officials did not believe that the information on the laptop was likely to be significant.

4. Key members of the FBI Midyear team had been reassigned to the investigation of Russian interference in the U.S. election, which was a higher priority.

The IG walks through each of the four points, and identifies why each of them makes absolutely no sense against events that were taking place at the time. Ending with this summation:

Page #330: In sum, we concluded that the explanations given for the failure of the FBI to take action on the Weiner laptop between September 29 and the end of October were unpersuasive.

The FBI had all the information it needed on September 29 to obtain the search warrant that it did not seek until more than a month later. The FBI’s neglect had potentially far-reaching consequences. Comey told the OIG that, had he known about the laptop in the beginning of October and thought the email review could have been completed before the election, it may have affected his decision to notify Congress. Comey told the OIG, “I don’t know [if] it would have put us in a different place, but I would have wanted to have the opportunity.”

And then the IG gets to the heart of the matter:

Page #331: We found that what changed between September 29 and October 27 that finally prompted the FBI to take action was not new information about what was on the Weiner laptop but rather the inquiries from the SDNY prosecutors and then from the Department [Main Justice]. The only thing of significance that had changed was the calendar and the fact that people outside of the FBI were inquiring about the status of the Weiner laptop.

And right there, this becomes a great example why we see so much criticism of the IG report.  The report clearly says why the excuses make no sense and were false.  The IG report also clearly says what is most likely the real reason for the re-opening of the investigation.  Both good points.

However, what is missing from the report is an explanation for: ‘why the FBI didn’t initiate the review’?

The IG give a reason for the excuses not to be believed; gives a reason for the FBI finally taking action; but it never gives the reason why the Clinton email review was not undertaken….. the report leaves the actual biggest point as a dangling question.

Every intellectually honest person reading knows the MYE team didn’t investigate the laptop because they didn’t want to re-open the investigation; and the FBI team (Via McCabe, Page, Strzok and Tashina Gauhar) figured it could simply be avoided.  However, the IG cannot prove that, because the participants deny it.   So the IG can only disprove the FBI assertions and excuses…. and he did.  But that leaves the FBI getting away with the corrupt part of it…. and leaves all of us frustrated, again.

https://www.scribd.com/embeds/381806566/content?start_page=1&view_mode=&access_key=key-4WfKaOih0Xm7EA7gdK93

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It’s October 27th, 2016, the day before James Comey announces his FBI decision to re-open the Clinton investigation. Jim Rybicki still saying McCabe should be recused from input; everyone else, including FBI Legal Counsel James Baker, is disagreeing with Rybicki and siding with Lisa Page.

Meanwhile the conversation has shifted slightly to “PC”, probable cause. Read:

While Lisa Page is leaking stories to Devlin Barrett (Wall Street Journal), the internal discussion amid the “small group” is about probable cause.

The team is now saying if there was no probable cause when Comey closed the original email investigation in July 2016 (remember the very tight boundaries of review), then there’s no probable cause in October 2016 to reopen the investigation regardless of what the email content might be.

This appears to be how the MYE “small group” or “tight team” justify doing nothing with the content received from New York. They received the emails September 28th and it’s now October 27th, and they haven’t even looked at it. Heck, they are debating if there’s even a need to look at it.

Then on October 28th, 2016, the FBI and Main Justice officials have a conference call about the entire Huma Abedin/Hillary Clinton email issue. Here’s where it gets interesting.

George Toscas and David Laufman from DOJ-NSD articulate a position that something needs to happen likely because Main Justice is concerned about the issue of FBI (McCabe) sitting on the emails for over three weeks without any feedback to SDNY (New York).

Thanks to Deputy Director McCabe, Main Justice in DC, specifically DOJ National Security Division, now looks like they are facilitating a cover-up operation being conducted by the FBI “small group”. [which is actually true, but they can’t let that be so glaringly obvious].

As a result of the Top-Tier officials conference call, Strzok is grumpy agent because his opinion appears to be insignificant. The decision is reached to announce the re-opening of the investigation. This sends Lisa Page bananas…

…In rapid response mode Lisa Page reaches out to Devlin Barrett, again to quickly shape the media coverage. Now that the world is aware of the need for a Clinton email investigation 2.0 the internal conversation returns to McCabe’s recusal.

Please note that at no time in the FBI is anyone directing an actual investigation of the content of the Clinton emails. Every single second of every effort is devoted to shaping the public perception of the need for the investigation. Every media outlet is being watched; every article is being read; and the entire apparatus of the small group is shaping coverage therein by contacting their leak outlets.