Trish Regan: The gloves are off and America will get answers
The gloves are off. Not only has Attorney General Bill Barr hired a so-called pit bull to investigate the investigators, John Durham out of Connecticut, who has a history of investigating officials. He is also working with the nation’s top national security leaders to get to the bottom of exactly how this whole Russia investigation got started in the first place.
Durham will review “all intelligence collection activities” related to the Trump 2016 campaign, including how the FBI got away with using opposition research bought and paid for by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to secure a warrant to spy on an American citizen, who worked for the Trump campaign.
About time, right? We spend two years listening to the media and former intelligence officials tell us that Trump was an agent of Russia and now we know there was no collusion and he was no agent of Russia.
So why would the FBI’s top lawyer, James Baker, not question the use of the dossier? He volunteered that he never authenticated anything — telling lawmakers behind closed doors that he didn't read the Woods file, which provides the underlying documentation.
Meanwhile, it was highly unusual for him to be this involved in a case, something he told Congress, "at that point in time when I was at the FBI, most of the FISA -- almost all the FISA applications did not go through me.
If this was as sensitive a case as he indicates then why not triple check your sources or just check them, before filing for a FISA warrant?
And then why not inform the FISA court judge that your application is based upon opposition research? Why leave it in a little footnote when that’s rather important.
Baker himself explained on Friday that, “Nobody’s gonna miss a page long footnote in regular type, okay?”
Excuse me? You treat hearsay and tabloid opposition research as legitimate FBI research and never headline it as such for the judge?
Baker’s inexplicable reason for just footnoting the source of the dossier to the judge? “You don’t want to put into a document like this gratuitous information about U.S. persons. You want to try to minimize it, to some extent.”
How about not using material you haven’t sourced? I mean this is the FBI!
This should make everyone left, right and center angry because if we have people in big government thinking they can do whatever they want, and spy on innocent Americans then we have big, big problems.
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There were all kinds of easily disprovable things in the dossier. For one, the dossier claims with such specificity that Michael Cohen was in Prague in August 2016 holding secret meetings with the Kremlin.
But Michael Cohen had never even traveled to Prague and that was pretty easy to figure out. Check his passport records?! Mueller figured it out; it’s in Volume 2, page 139.
And there are more but the point is: If, as I suspect, the FBI relied on opposition research for political purposes then this is the biggest scandal in modern American political history. Perhaps the biggest ever in this country.