Paul Sperry: The FBI Hid The Full Extent of Its Serial Frauds Upon the FISA Court By Redacting Details of Its Deceptions in FOIA Documents

It claimed the redactions were to protect "sources and methods." In fact, they are denying information the public has a right to to protect the FBI's criminal leadership.

The embattled bureau tried to hide its misconduct by redacting information about its actions under the guise that it involved sensitive intelligence information. RCI has learned that at least some of the redacted material, included in a "Classified Appendix" to Special Counsel John Durham's final report, has nothing to do with protecting "sources and methods" and other "sensitive" investigative techniques.

Instead, it covers up additional improper behavior by the FBI brass, which initiated and signed off on all four of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications to spy on former Trump adviser Carter Page and his contacts within the Trump campaign and presidency in 2016 and 2017.

For example, the FBI tried to justify continuing to spy on Page in early 2017 by indicating to the secret FISA court that it had verified a rumor about Page receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government and facilitating a "well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" with the Kremlin to swing the 2016 election in Trump's favor. But the bureau had corroborated no such thing. Its source was a front-page report in the Washington Post -- one the newspaper later retracted after determining it was false, according to two former U.S. officials who have seen the original, unredacted FISA applications and described the passages to RCI.

In other words, the supporting evidence it claimed proved a "well-developed conspiracy of cooperation" with Russia was a Washington Post article, which, of course, just repeated all of the lies that the FBI's RussiaGate source Christopher Steele was feeding it.

But the FBI doesn't want you to know that.

So they blacked out the documents which specify that all we're talking about here is a newspaper article, and they claimed the "Sources and Methods" exemption as their pretext to hide it.

The FBI is claiming you're not allowed to know they read publicly-available newspapers!

The embarrassing revelation hasn't been previously reported thanks to redactions blacking out references to the Washington Post article in the still-partially classified applications. The officials confirmed to RCI that the censored section covers up the FBI's reliance on the bogus Post story, published in March 2017, as purported evidence supporting probable cause to continue spying on Trump's former aide. In the sections of the FISA renewal applications blacking out references to the Post, the officials said the FBI claimed the underlying text was "sensitive information."

That's too sensitive to disclose! We can't let the Russkies know we've developed this cutting edge technique of reading public newspapers!

The real reason they're blacking it out is because their "source" is just circular-reporting bullshit, Christopher Steele feeding the same crap to the Post that he's feeding to the FBI, with the criminals at the FBI then claiming the Washington Post is an "independent source" that "confirms" their original source. When their "original source" is the same person as the "independent source," and they know that.

 The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss still-classified sections of the FISA warrant affidavits.

The FBI's references to the Post story are contained in the April and June 2017 FISA applications. These applications were so tainted by bad information, politics, and glaring exculpatory omissions that after an inspector general's probe, the Justice Department years later had to secretly concede to a federal surveillance court that they were "insufficient" to establish probable cause to spy on Page and therefore "were not valid."

FBI Director Christopher Wray recently told Congress he has instituted a number of reforms in response to the FISA surveillance abuses, yet at the same time, he appears to have tried to hide the full extent of those abuses under redactions.

An FBI spokeswoman said, "We decline comment on this matter." Attempts to reach Durham, who has closed his office looking into FBI malfeasance, were unsuccessful.

And why would you comment? Why should the Stasi lower itself to answer the questions of the people?

Another case of the FBI engaging in its own conspiracy to frame a man, using the circular-reporting "confirmation" of a paid shill for Hillary Clinton:

This is not the only instance in which the FBI misrepresented unconfirmed news reports to secure authorization to spy on the Trump campaign. The bureau's FISA applications also referenced a September 2016 Yahoo News account to substantiate the false claim that Page had met with Kremlin officials in Moscow during the presidential campaign.

That Yahoo article by Michael Isikoff said the allegations had been confirmed by a "well-placed Western intelligence source." Isikoff later revealed that the source, former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, had concocted the false allegation about Page in a series of now-debunked memos financed by Hillary Clinton's campaign. Hence, Steele was "corroborating" his own shoddy work. Instead of following the law and verifying this material before including it in the FISA application, the FBI simply repeated it as fact. In 2018, Isikoff said it was "a bit beyond me" why the bureau referenced his article.

So the FBI again claim that the Yahoo story "confirms" Steele's "tips," but of course Steele was the source for the Yahoo story. Steele is "confirming" himself.

The FBI knows this is going on. But it perpetrates a fraud on the court because they're criminals who are in the permanent business of rigging American elections.

Before this next part, you need to understand that leftwing "think tank" worker and Clinton Administration Hopeful Igor Danchenko was making all of this crap up. When asked who his source for his claims was, he said "Sergei Millian."

That was a good name to drop, because Millian was a big macher and knew Trump. So if Millian was the source, Igor Danchenko's lies at least had some potential credibility.

The trouble was: The FBI could never verify that Millian was providing this "intelligence." He vigorously denied it, both in public and to the FBI.

But that didn't stop the FBI from claiming they'd "confirmed" he was the source.

Their proof for that? The Washington Post article which itself was just more lies from Steele and Danchenko.

The officials who spoke to RCI said the inclusion of the since-retracted Post story may be even more egregious because it was unsourced, which should have sent red flags flying at the FBI. Post reporters said a key source of the dossier's allegations was a Belarusian-American businessman named Sergei Millian. The Post, however, provided no source for this blockbuster claim, which Millian vociferously denied.

The FBI's reliance on the false Post story was "an act of desperation," noted one of the officials. In late March 2017, he said the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane team investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia faced a dilemma. A court deadline to reapply for a warrant to spy on Page was fast approaching, and it still hadn't verified the sourcing for the key "conspiracy" charge against him and the Trump campaign.

Moreover, agents had reason to be skeptical about the information, which formed the cornerstone of their case.

Over the previous two months, the FBI had conducted a series of interviews with Igor Danchenko, a Russia-born Washington-based researcher who helped compile Steele's dossier of derogatory information about Trump's alleged ties to Russia, including the core "conspiracy" assertion. During the debriefings, Danchenko confessed he couldn't be sure his alleged source, Millian, actually told him what he attributed to him about Page in the dossier. 

The FBI needed the explosive allegation to be true because it was the heart of the factual information supporting probable cause to electronically monitor Page as a supposed Russian collaborator under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The FISA law, initially enacted in 1978 and broadened in the aftermath of 9/11, is now under intense scrutiny on Capitol Hill in light of previously exposed FBI abuses of the congressionally granted surveillance power. The bureau included the information in earlier requests for wiretaps, but they were set to expire in early April 2017. To justify renewing them another 90 days, the FBI was under pressure to show FISA judges additional evidence to support its suspicions about Page. Validating Millian as the main source of the dossier was critical, but the agents had come up empty, developing no evidence that corroborated the allegations.

Just in time, the Washington Post published a story online on March 29, 2017, that supposedly "confirmed" Millian was the source of the allegations against Page and the core claim of a Trump-Kremlin conspiracy. The strangely unsourced article carried the headline, "Who is 'Source D'? The man said to be behind the Trump-Russia dossier's most salacious claim: The story of Sergei Millian." The next day, the Post ran the same story on Page One of the paper, but under the headline: "Insider or opportunist? A wild card in Russia story: Businessman said to be source of spy dossier's salacious claim about Trump." The above-the-fold article appeared just eight days prior to the April 7 deadline the FBI faced to resubmit an application to the FISA court for a fresh warrant to secretly monitor Page.

...

FBI veterans who have sworn out affidavits for FISA wiretaps told RCI they have never known the bureau to cite media stories as evidence to corroborate leads or support probable cause to obtain such all-invasive warrants from the spy court.

The FBI surely knew that this was just the Clinton-paid Steele, and the Clinton-loving, would-be Clinton hireling Danchenko, peddling the same lies to the Washington Post so that the FBI could point to that article as "confirming" their previous lies.

But the FBI went along with it anyway.

Proof that the FBI knows that all the agents who did this knew exactly what they were doing can be seen in the simple fact that the FBI is continuing to cover up for them with these false, illegal redactions. The Fed Mafia is still burning their old business records.

And Christopher Wray has not punished anyone for this. He says he's instituted "reforms" of the "system."

Whenever bureaucrats behave badly, or even break the law, or conspire to deprive citizens of their civil rights or rig an American election, their escape plan is just to get their higher-ups to give them "additional retraining" and to "reform the system."

But it wasn't "the system" that needs the reform. It's not "the system" that used falsified warrants to con a court into allowing the FBI to spy on the Trump campaign to help the Hillary Clinton campaign.

FBI personnel did that. It is they who need reform -- punishment; firing, and subsequently prosecution -- not the "system."

It is simply not even remotely plausible that the FBI agents rigging the election and conning the court into granting them a FISA "didn't know they couldn't use the same source as the original tipster and also use him to confirm his own tip."

They knew that. They knew they were breaking the rules -- and the law.

But they did it anyway.

And Christopher Wray's reply is, "I changed some regulations." The criminals ignored the last set of regulations, which also forbade this; why should new ones matter?

Do citizens, when accused by the FBI of obstruction of justice, get to say, "Oh dear, I'm sorry, I'll reform my system for answering FBI questions and do better in the future?"

Does Trump get to plead "I'll reform my classified documents handling system?"

No -- it's only federal bureaucrats doing the Regime's skulduggery who get to avoid punishment, offering "The system" up as a whipping boy instead.

But that's how the game works. When a crime has been committed and you don't want to prosecute the criminals because they're your palz and fellow Democrats, you say "the system" was the Real Criminal, and you give that system oh such a good spanking! You make sure that system is good and chastised and promises to never do wrong again!

And then you continue paying your pals who rigged two fucking American elections in a row $185,000 per year for their services, with 90% of salary for their yearly retirement payments.

And you definitely don't punish or "reform" your palz and political correligionists.

Punishment and accountability are for the Enemies of the FBI, not its palz.

In very related news: The FBI investigated who it was in government who had paid an Israeli hacking company -- a company on the list of the government's blacklist, a company government agents were forbidden to do business with -- for a tool used to spy on American citizens.

The FBI did find the criminal behind this -- Surprise! It was the FBI!

Whoops!

Whoopsie!

Who Paid for a Mysterious Spy Tool? The F.B.I., an F.B.I. Inquiry Found.

After a Times report, the bureau canceled its contract with a government contractor that used the tool on its behalf. But questions remain.

After they had been discovered paying for the spy tool by an outsider, only then did they cancel the contract.

You know what I smell? I smell "the system" is going to be subjected to further "reforms!"

But not a single FBI agent!

When The New York Times reported in April that a contractor had purchased and deployed a spying tool made by NSO, the contentious Israeli hacking firm, for use by the U.S. government, White House officials said they were unaware of the contract and put the F.B.I. in charge of figuring out who might have been using the technology.

After an investigation, the F.B.I. uncovered at least part of the answer: It was the F.B.I.

The deal for the surveillance tool between the contractor, Riva Networks, and NSO was completed in November 2021. Only days before, the Biden administration had put NSO on a Commerce Department blacklist, which effectively banned U.S. firms from doing business with the company. For years, NSO's spyware had been abused by governments around the world.

This particular tool, known as Landmark, allowed government officials to track people in Mexico without their knowledge or consent.

The F.B.I. now says that it used the tool unwittingly

"Unwittingly." No "intent," you see. "No reasonable prosecutor would bring charges.

Once the agency discovered in late April that Riva had used the spying tool on its behalf, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, terminated the contract, according to U.S. officials.

What a hero. Once again, coming to the rescue after his agency is proven once again to be breaking the law.

Get workin' on those newest "reforms" to "the system," Chrissy.

posted by Ace at 03:15 PM

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