Michael Horowitz, the inspector general for the Department of Justice, is slated to file his report on FISA abuses during the Obama administration by September. It was pushed back due to ex-MI6 spook Christopher Steele agreeing to be interviewed by investigators. Of course, that means everything else collected thus far had to be re-reviewed per usual. Steele is the former British intelligence operative who compiled the infamous Clinton campaign-funded dossier, aka the Trump dossier, which was largely unverified and totally debunked by the report filed by ex-Special Counsel Robert Mueller who looked into Russian collusion. From the looks of it, and by that I mean the glaring errors that could’ve been caught by a simple Google search, the document was not verified but cited as credible in a spy warrant against former Trump campaign official Carter Page. This is what Horowitz is looking into and it’s said to be scorching. Now, Paul Sperry of Real Clear Investigations writes that we may have some nuggets dropping prior to the release of the full report, which states that former FBI Director James Comey had an agent conducting surveillance within the White House, that he wasn’t forthright with Trump about the investigation, and it appears he was running a covert operation against the president. This is deep state antics, folks. I mean isn’t this spying? And all of it happened under the Obama administration. It looks like Comey was trying to put a plan into motion that would be aimed at stopping the Trump presidency, something revealed through a text message from fired and disgraced former FBI Agent Peter Strzok (via Real Clear Investigations):
Sources tell RealClearInvestigations that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will soon file a report with evidence indicating that Comey was misleading the president. Even as he repeatedly assured Trump that he was not a target, the former director was secretly trying to build a conspiracy case against the president, while at times acting as an investigative agent.
Two U.S. officials briefed on the inspector general’s investigation of possible FBI misconduct said Comey was essentially “running a covert operation against” the president, starting with a private “defensive briefing” he gave Trump just weeks before his inauguration. They said Horowitz has examined high-level FBI text messages and other communications indicating Comey was actually conducting a “counterintelligence assessment” of Trump during that January 2017 meeting in New York.
In addition to adding notes of his meetings and phone calls with Trump to the official FBI case file, Comey had an agent inside the White House who reported back to FBI headquarters about Trump and his aides, according to other officials familiar with the matter.
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…former FBI counterintelligence agent and lawyer Mark Wauck said, the FBI lacked legal grounds to treat Trump as a suspect. “They had no probable cause against Trump himself for ‘collusion’ or espionage,” he said. “They were scrambling to come up with anything to hang a hat on, but had found nothing.”
What remains unclear is why Comey would take such extraordinary steps against a sitting president. The Mueller report concluded there was no basis for the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theories.
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Republicans including House Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Devin Nunes believe that Comey, like his top counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, was attempting to “stop” the Trump presidency for political reasons.
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At the same time Comey was personally scrutinizing the president during meetings in the White House and phone conversations from the FBI, he had an agent inside the White House working on the Russia investigation, where he reported back to FBI headquarters about Trump and his aides, according to officials familiar with the matter. The agent, Anthony Ferrante, who specialized in cyber crime, left the White House around the same time Comey was fired and soon joined a security consulting firm, where he contracted with BuzzFeed to lead the news site's efforts to verify the Steele dossier, in connection with a defamation lawsuit.
Knowledgeable sources inside the Trump White House say Comey carved out an extraordinary new position for Ferrante, which allowed him to remain on reserve status at the FBI while working in the White House as a cybersecurity adviser.
[…]
In his memoir, Comey said he flew to New York on Jan. 6, 2017, to give the president-elect a private “defensive briefing” — to "tell him what Russia had done to try to help elect him.”
But there was more to it than that, in light of Comey’s meeting in the Oval Office the day before with Obama, Biden and the other Cabinet officials. Their plan to brief Trump, which Obama approved, included disclosing allegations from the dossier about the president-elect.
As the top law enforcement official in the room, Comey was chosen to confront Trump with "the material" that accused him of being compromised by Russia and engaging in a criminal conspiracy with Moscow to hack the election. The morning before flying to New York, Comey met at FBI headquarters with a group of counterespionage officials and agents who were read in on the plan — code-named the “sensitive matter team” — for an update on the allegations against Trump and the overall Russia investigation.
It’s a lengthy piece, but Sperry adds that Comey didn’t inform Trump about a lot concerning the dossier. One specific example was his failure to tell Trump that Michael Flynn was under investigation, among many, many other things. Spies in the White House, obfuscating the truth concerning the dossier with the then-president-elect, and people wonder if the Democrats are freaking out. They are. They have to be; all of this was supposed to have been swept under the rug because Hillary was going to win, right? Wrong. A lot of dirty laundry is about to be aired, folks. And it looks very disturbing…if you’re a left-wing resistance crackpot.
We discussed this a bit yesterday on Triggered.