Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will release his report next month on the ways the FBI received warrants using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) on Carter Page [featured image], who served as an aide for then-candidate Donald Trump.
The report will include information about an FBI lawyer under criminal investigation for allegedly changing a document related to the documents used to obtain the warrant.
This is huge news, but CNN tried to water it down a bit (emphasis mine):
Horowitz turned over evidence on the allegedly altered document to John Durham, the federal prosecutor appointed early this year by Attorney General William Barr to conduct a broad investigation of intelligence gathered for the Russia probe by the CIA and other agencies, including the FBI. The altered document is also at least one focus of Durham’s criminal probe.It’s unknown how significant a role the altered document played in the FBI’s investigation of Page. The alterations were significant enough to have shifted the document’s meaning and came up during a part of Horowitz’s FISA review where details were classified, according to the sources. It did not change Horowitz’s finding that the FISA application had a legal basis, The Washington Post first reported.
Question: Then why did the lawyer change the document?
The story gets better because The Washington Post quietly deleted a portion of its report. The editors did not provide an explanation for the change until hours later.
I see a familiar name! (emphasis mine):
But the Post, hours after publishing its story, conspicuously removed the portion of its reporting that the FBI employee involved worked “beneath” Peter Strzok, the FBI’s since-fired head of counterintelligence. The Post did not offer an explanation for the change, which occurred shortly after midnight. Earlier this week, the DOJ highlighted a slew of anti-Trump text messages sent by Strzok when he was leading the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the probe into the Trump campaign.”The person under scrutiny has not been identified but is not a high-ranking official — they worked beneath former deputy assistant director Peter Strzok, according to people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss material that has not yet been made public,” The Post wrote in its now-deleted paragraph.The paper eventually added a correction to the bottom of its piece, reading, “Correction: An earlier version of this story erroneously stated that the FBI employee being investigated for altering a document worked underneath former Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok. The employee was a low-level lawyer in the Office of General Counsel and did not report to the deputy assistant director.”
Have you noticed that the government and media will describe people as “low level” in order to dismiss their testimonies or actions? Interesting:
Nevertheless, Horowitz reportedly found that the FBI employee was involved enough in the FISA process to falsely state that he had “documentation to back up a claim he had made in discussions with the Justice Department about the factual basis” for the FISA warrant application, the Post reported. Then, the FBI employee allegedly “altered an email” to substantiate his inaccurate version of events. The employee has since been forced out of the bureau.
The report will come out on December 9. Horowitz will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on December 11.
Something tells me the left will call the report “damning” for Trump while the right will say it “vindicates” Trump.
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