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FBI Tag

I was traveling Friday when the memo about the FISA application to surveil Carter Page, supported by the Fusion GPS-produced Clinton-funded Steele Dossier, was released. It was one of those days when being mostly off the grid was a good thing. I was only able to follow the Twitter reaction, and take a quick glimpse on my phone at the memo itself. So I mostly sat back and watched the fireworks.

Friday, the now highly anticipated intelligence memo was declassified and made public. Mary covered that in detail here. The memo, "alleges that the FBI did in fact use the disputed dossier to receive FISA warrants to spy on members of then-candidate Donald Trump’s team," blogs Mary. For all the hoopla, speculation, an entire week of gossipy leaks and story wars, the memo (or the version of the memo made public Friday) is mostly meh. Without supporting evidence or more information, the memo is just another facet of the ongoing FBI/Russian Collusion/Who Dunnit saga plaguing politics, and as Mary pointed out, creates more questions than it answers.

President Donald Trump's Chief of Staff John Kelly said on Fox News Radio that the president will release House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes' memo soon. From Fox News:
In a radio exclusive, White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly, joined Brian Kilmeade at the White House to talk about President Trump's first State of the Union address. Kelly discussed President Trump taking the handcuffs off of the military in Afghanistan, working on a bipartisan solution on DACA, why his heart breaks over identity politics in America and President Trump releasing the Nunes memo "pretty quick and the whole world can see it."

The Guardian has reported that the FBI has a second President Donald Trump-Russia dossier that allegedly corroborates some information in the Christopher Steele dossier. One caveat: Cody Shearer, an activist close to failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's camp, authored this one.

Fox News has reported that the DOJ inspector general has announced that they have located the missing text messages:
Text messages from a critical five-month period between Trump-bashing FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who both served on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, have been located, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz has told Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.
*This is a breaking story. MORE TO COME.

Text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page came to light last month due to the anti-Trump rhetoric involved. Now the FBI claims that the department "failed to preserve" five months of text messages between them. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI) have sent a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ) to demand answers over the missing text messages between Strzok and Page.

Newly-released messages between two FBI agents who were then working on the Hillary Clinton email investigation show that they and possibly then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch knew in advance that no charges would be recommended by then-FBI Director James Comey.  The FBI has further admitted to "losing" five months worth of texts between these same FBI agents.

Judicial Watch has taken the lead in pursuing government records of Hillary Clinton's sketchy use of at least 13 devices for emails while serving as Secretary of State, as well as her controversial decision to set up a private server. Judicial Watch's FOIA requests have resulted in quite a few bombshells.  Among them the fact that Hillary sent classified materials via email to her daughter and other such revelations that show the need to reopen the Hillary investigations.

A memo compiled by the House Intelligence Committee has several Republican Congressmen rattled. Thursday afternoon, lawmakers began demanding declassification of key points of a FISA Memo which they say "raise serious questions about the upper echelon of the Obama DOJ and Comey FBI" in the Russia/collusion investigation.

Ranking Judiciary Committee Member Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) released the closed testimony of Glenn Simpson, a founder of Fusion GPS, which produced the dossier in 2016 of then-candidate Donald Trump, along with his attorney Josh Levy. From The New York Times:
“The American people deserve the opportunity to see what he said and judge for themselves,” Ms. Feinstein said. “The innuendo and misinformation circulating about the transcript are part of a deeply troubling effort to undermine the investigation into potential collusion and obstruction of justice. The only way to set the record straight is to make the transcript public.”