It has been terrible to see how the world-famous law enforcement/crime heart of the organisation has been dragged low down by the counter intelligence section, exposed by the whole Trump/Russia saga. As the days of reckoning come closer and Nemesis approaches for the guilty, worrying examples of the FBI’s fall are in evidence everywhere. As the documents continue to be released from where they have been hidden, the anger will grow, but those of us who knew the FBI and loved its institutions and former integrity mourn for what the world has lost.

FISA Court Criminality and gross negligence passed off as “accidents”? .

The latest hammer blows to the integrity of the FBI came with the Inspector Generals report into the FISA court abuse. The FISA Court (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) was used and abused by the FBI leadership and every underling who was part of the process. The huge powers of the FISA court were used to put the Trump campaign under surveillance through now-discredited documents, the infamous “dossier” by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele.

The FBI was excoriated by that OIG report and it’s dishonesty in at least the case where false information was intentionally provided to the court to gain one of the two discredited FISA applications against Carter Page,

As professor Margaret Cleveland showed in The Federalist:-

The IG’s report on the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI’s handling of the Carter Page surveillance applications established 17 significant inaccuracies and omissions in the FISA application and renewals.

 All “accidents”? One could doubt that.

Dossier was doubtful very early

Thanks to the OIG report we also know that within a few weeks of the inauguration of President Trump the FBI knew that the dossier information on which the first FISA applications were made were discredited. By the very person who was alleged to have given that information to the dossier author Steele!

The OIG report itself shows that and, by implication, any worthwhile, half-competent law enforcement body would have picked up on the weakness, not go on to continue an operation against a then-sitting president of the United States! Pp 186 & 7 are enough to show it but to continue it on for over 2 years in spite of that?

Trump Tower Meeting June 2016 was a similar disgrace for the FBI

So much was made of the Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr, the then campaign director Paul Manafort, the Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and various Russians, one of whom ( Natalia Veselnitskaya) had been working for Fusion GPS the entity which employed Steele who had created the discredited dossier. Meeting with Glen Simpson head of Fusion GPS before and after the meeting with Trump and Co, was the Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya.

While there were many doubts and the Trump camp always insisted that the bulk of the meeting was about the Magnitsky Act and adoption of Russian children (the Russians lobbying for some time to get the Magnitsky Act repealed), the allegation in all the legacy media and Democrats was that the meeting was an attempt to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. “Opposition Research” on a campaign is an old tactic and not illegal, but it was from a supposed tie to the Russian government through Veselnitskaya that over two years of official investigation, leaks and innuendo were splashed all over the Trump administration. Note: not once did any comment come from the FBI or any of its media favourites that there was anything but suspicion attached to this meeting.

More documents showing the truth about the false “investigation”.

Everyone is onto this now, but the whole analysis was first printed by an expert online investigator, going by the screen name of Undercover Huber (@JohnWHuber). This is a parody of the real-life mystery man Huber, the prosecutor who hasn’t been much heard of in the years since he was supposed to be investigating the Clinton Foundation.

Undercover Huber has analysed documents, the release of FBI 302 documents (documents which are meant to record the actual detail of FBI interviews with suspects and others when in a formal setting) through the FBI Vault system. In this case the actual documents are available here.

Huber noted that in the FBI Vault release, evidence was provided that the FBI knew a mere four days after the Trump Tower meeting that there was no collusion between the Russian parties present and the Trump campaign members. This evidence was not from some mere member of either “side” where the credit of the witness could be put in doubt by that fact. This informant was the interpreter but one who had contracted for the US State Department for years, named Anatoli Samochornov, and whose wife actually worked for them during the Hillary time there!

The 302 showing his comments are basic, stark – and final. There was no collusion.

FBI going on from here

While my personal view is that the law enforcement side should be split from the counter intelligence and every other section and retain the name “FBI”, this worrying episode needs more than basic structural or cosmetic change. This needs reform root and branch because what we see and hear (all over social media, at least) is “don’t trust the FBI as it is now constituted”. This is intolerable.

For the FBI to know the falsity of allegations so soon to the time they were made, to continue years of investigations and surveillance – even on a president and his administration – years before anything was announced or the investigations ceased is a massive scandal.

It is too important to the world to lose what we had in an FBI which was respected everywhere. That ‘respect can never be retained (or regained) while these issues are unresolved through major reform

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