12/12/2019 / By JD Heyes
Barack Hussein Obama took office in 2009 promising to “fundamentally transform” America.
Astute political analysts back then said that Obama must really hate the country he was elected to lead because you don’t ‘fundamentally’ alter something you love.
Well, the nation’s 44th president accomplished much of what he set out to do: He transformed many of our governing institutions into extensions of the Democrat Party, politicizing even the Justice Department and the FBI.
In his highly anticipated report released Monday, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz documented dozens of instances where key FBI officials lied and hid evidence in order to secure warrants to spy on the 2016 Trump campaign, an unprecedented abuse of power, the gravity and implications of which many Americans still do not fully grasp.
As noted by The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross:
To understand just how shoddy the FBI’s work was in securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant targeting the Trump campaign, you only need to read an obscure attachment to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report.
Appendix 1 identifies the total violations by the FBI of the so-called Woods Procedures, the process by which the bureau verifies information and assures the FISA court its evidence is true.
According to the index, there are 51 Woods procedure violations pertaining to the FISA application the bureau submitted to the court in requesting a warrant to spy on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page beginning in October 2016.
And indeed, nine of those violations — a huge number, Ross notes — fell into this catetgory: “Supporting document shows that the factual assertion is inaccurate.”
Ross explains that in IG “parlance” that means the FBI made nine false statements and assertions to the FISA court in order to obtain the surveillance warrant. “In short,” he wrote, “what the bureau said was contradicted by the evidence in its official file.”
Now, given the knowledge of how the FISA application process works and given the fact that these FBI officials are pros at what they do, there is no way they could have made this many mistakes accidentally or unknowingly, leading a rational person to believe that the lies and omissions had to be intentional.
Ross notes that in order to put these ‘errors’ in context, former Trump administration aides Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos were convicted of making one false statement each to the FBI. Papadopoulos has already served a brief period in federal prison for his conviction; Flynn has yet to be sentenced (probably because now that all of this has come out, his lawyer has plenty of information to get him off the conviction).
Also, more context: James Comey signed off on the FISA court warrants which were all premised on a single piece of ‘intelligence’ — the ‘Russia dossier’ that was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, and which Comey knew was political propaganda. And he allegedly lied to Congress, another crime.
That’s defrauding the FISA court; he’s not been charged, let alone sentenced.
Further context: His deputy, Andrew McCabe, was fired for lying to federal investigators about leaking information to the media — two violations of law. But he has also not been charged.
In addition, Ross notes, the appendix documents that the FBI made an additional nine factual claims that did not match supporting evidence, meaning agents fibbed on several other occasions as well.
Finally, the FBI lied by omission. The remaining 33 Woods violations “involved failing to provide any evidence in the Woods procedure backing up the assertion in the FISA warrant application,” Ross noted.
“Lying to a court generally gets a person thrown in jail. What did the FISA Court do to anyone within the FBI for NINE lies? Nothing.”
It’s time for Attorney General William Barr to authorize some indictments of these people. Otherwise, few Americans will ever trust the FBI or DoJ again.
Sources include:
Tagged Under: Andrew McCabe, corruption, deep state, FBI, FBI corruption, FISA abuses, FISA court, Horowitz report, investigation, James Comey, Michale Horowitz, Obama Administration, President Trump, Spygate, treason
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