The IG report also establishes that the fourth sub-investigation of General Flynn was opened six days after the others — on August 16, 2016, the day after the meeting in Andy McCabe’s office.

Agent Barnett’s 302 says he was the Case Agent for both the Manafort investigation and the Flynn investigation. But then he also says the following:

From September 2016 to November 2016, Barnett advised that very little was being done on the Razor investigation.

As noted in the bolded language above in Lisa Page’s comments to Rachel Maddow, the “insurance policy” was needed in case candidate Trump won the election and some member of his campaign associated with Russia would then have access to classified information. It seems pretty clear that the reference about an “insurance policy” is a reference to having something to do with a person in the campaign who might go into the Administration if Trump won. A decision to open a new investigation was made earlier that day in the meeting with McCabe, the next morning Crossfire Razor was opened with Gen. Flynn as the target.

News reports last month claimed that in late 2019 the FBI had opened an investigation of matters related to information found on a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden. Would the bureau continue its probe under a Biden administration? Doubtful. In fact, it’s unlikely there was ever any investigation at all.

There was never an investigation of General Flynn. There was a file opened. But nothing was ever done according to Agent Barnett. And nothing would have ever been done if Donald Trump had not won the election — according to Page and Strzok.

The opening of an investigation of General Flynn — “Crossfire Razor” — was the “insurance policy” in the event Donald Trump was elected. Page, Papadolopous, and Manafort were not going to be in the Trump Administration — all had left the campaign by the fall of 2016, so they would not have access to classified information or otherwise be helpful to the Russians. But Comey, McCabe, Strzok, and Page knew Flynn would be in the Administration. Having Crossfire Razor open BEFORE the election meant the FBI could continue investigating the Trump Administration after candidate Trump became President-Elect Trump, and then after the inauguration as well, without having to say they only opened the investigation after Trump’s victory.

Agent Barnett said there wasn’t much “predicate” to support the investigation of General Flynn, yet on August 15, 2016, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok have already concluded that General Flynn has connections to Russia and Putin that meant he should not have access to classified information.

It is a violation of FBI policy to open a counterintelligence case file on a US Person with no present intention to conduct a counterintelligence investigation of the US Person. It might even be a crime.

And yet that is exactly what Special Agent Barnett says FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok did with regard to General Michael Flynn, decorated U.S. war hero.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) informed the secret surveillance court that the Bureau did not disclose the fact that it has investigated a primary source for the Steele dossier as a Russian agent.

Graham published the memo he sent to the court, indicating that Igor Danchenko was being investigated by the FBI beginning in 2009. The document also pointed out that the Bureau’s Crossfire Hurricane team, which was tasked with looking into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, already knew about the prior investigation of Danchenko but neglected to disclose it in the application to spy on former Trump campaign staffer Carter Page.

Former British spy Christopher Steele, who compiled a dossier full of damaging information about then-candidate Donald Trump, used Danchenko as his primary source for the document, which has by now been almost entirely discredited. The Daily Caller reported that the Senator “formally notified James Boasberg, the judge presiding over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) about the information in a letter on Thursday.”

In the memo, Graham wrote, “This letter, and the attached summary, details what appear to be further failures on the part of the FBI to fully inform the court of all of the facts related to the probable cause determination for the Carter Page FISA applications.”

U.S. Attorney John Durham discovered that the primary sub-source for British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s discredited dossier was investigated by the FBI as a possible “threat to national security,” but the bureau never told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and used the dossier anyway. //

In the release, we see that as far back as 2005, the primary sub-source for the Steele dossier was suspected of being a Russian agent. This revelation heavily implies that the FBI knew this could be an attempt at Russian disinformation and that the information could not possibly be reliable. How do we know they knew that? They never brought that investigation up to the FISA court when obtaining warrants. If they had, there would have been a big pause from the court in granting those warrants.

But these email exchanges released today show that the agents working on the Crossfire Razor investigation had been intending to shut down the investigation as long as 60 days prior to the drafting of the order to close it down, but the matter was being kept open by FBI management using the excuse of getting NSLs which were not thought by the agents to be useful — and there was no intent to use them because of the fact that the results would not have meaningful information.

These emails further support the argument that the Flynn investigation was corrupted by motives of individuals in FBI management to simply keep digging on General Flynn until they could find something — anything — as leverage to use against him in an effort to force him out of the Trump Administration.

Newly disclosed internal FBI notes and text messages detail the extent of the FBI's desire to take down Trump and his associates at any cost.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents tasked by fired former Director James Comey to take down Donald Trump during and after the 2016 election were so concerned about the agency’s potentially illegal behavior that they purchased liability insurance to protect themselves less than two weeks before Trump was inaugurated president, previously hidden FBI text messages show. The explosive new communications and internal FBI notes were disclosed in federal court filings today from Sidney Powell, the attorney who heads Michael Flynn’s legal defense team.

“[W]e all went and purchased professional liability insurance,” one agent texted on Jan. 10, 2017, the same day CNN leaked details that then-President-elect Trump had been briefed by Comey about the bogus Christopher Steele dossier. That briefing of Trump was used as a pretext to legitimize the debunked dossier, which was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign and compiled by a foreign intelligence officer who was working for a sanctioned Russian oligarch.

“Holy crap,” an agent responded. “All the analysts too?”

“Yep,” the first agent said. “All the folks at the Agency as well.”

“[C]an I ask who are the most likely litigators?” an agent responded. “[A]s far as potentially suing y’all[?]”

“[H]aha, who knows….I think [t]he concern when we got it was that there was a big leak at DOJ and the NYT among others was going to do a piece,” the first agent said. //

The new disclosures made by DOJ also show that the FBI used so-called national security letters (NSLs) to spy on Flynn’s finances. Unlike traditional subpoenas, which require judicial review and approval before authorities can seize an innocent person’s property and information, NSLs are never independently reviewed by courts. One of the agents noted in a text message that the NSLs were just being used as a pretext by FBI leadership to buy time to find dirt on Flynn after the first investigation of him yielded no derogatory information.

Compromised reveals that the FBI found that during at least some of the time the illegals were under investigation, the Russian numbers intended for them were sent not by a transmitter in Russia (which might have difficulty being reliably received in the US), but relayed by the Cuban shortwave numbers station. This is perhaps a bit surprising, since the period in question (2000-2010) was well after the Soviet Union, the historic protector of Cuba's government, had ceased to exist.

The Cuban numbers station is somewhat legendary. It is a powerful station, operated by Cuba's intelligence directorate but co-located with Radio Habana's transmitters near Bauta, Cuba, and is easily received with even very modest equipment throughout the US. While its numbers transmissions have taken a variety of forms over the years, during the early 2000's it operated around the clock, transmitting in both voice and morse code. The station was (and remains) so powerful and widely heard that radio hobbyists quickly derived its hourly schedule. During this period, each scheduled hourly transmission consisted of a preamble followed by three messages, each made up entirely of a series of five digit groups (with by a brief period of silence separating the three messages). The three hourly messages would take a total of about 45 minutes, in either voice or morse code depending on the scheduled time and frequency. Every hour, the same thing, predictably right on schedule (with fill traffic presumably substituted for the slots during which there was no actual message).

If you want to hear what this sounded like, here's a recording I made on October 4, 2008 of one of the hourly voice transmissions, as received (static and all) in my Philadelphia apartment: www.mattblaze.org/private/17435khz-200810041700.mp3. The transmission follows the standard Cuban numbers format of the time, starting with an "Atenćion" preamble listing three five-digit identifiers for the three messages that follow, and ending with "Final, Final". In this recording, the first of the three messages (64202) starts at 3:00, the second (65852) at 16:00, and the third (86321) at 29:00, with the "Final" signoff at the end. The transmissions are, to my cryptographic ear at least, both profoundly dull and yet also eerily riveting.

And this is where the mystery I've been wondering about comes in. In 2007, I noticed an odd anomaly: some messages completely lacked the digit 9 ("nueve"). Most messages had, as they always did and as you'd expect with OTP ciphertext, a uniform distribution of the digits 0-9. But other messages, at random times, suddenly had no 9s at all. I wasn't the only (or the first) person to notice this; apparently the 9s started disappearing from messages some time around 2005.

This is, to say the least, very odd. The way OTPs work should produce a uniform distribution of all ten digits in the ciphertext. The odds of an entire message lacking 9s (or any other digit) are infinitesimal. And yet such messages were plainly being transmitted, and fairly often at that. In fact, in the recording of the 2008 transmission linked to above, you will notice that while the second and third messages use all ten digits, the first is completely devoid of 9s.

I remember concluding that the most likely, if still rather improbable, explanation was that the 9-less messages were dummy fill traffic and that the random number generator used to create the messages had a bug or developed a defect that prevented 9s from being included. This would be, to say the least, a very serious error, since it would allow a listener to easily distinguish fill traffic from real traffic, completely negating the benefit of having fill traffic in the first place. It would open the door to exactly the kind of traffic analysis that the system was carefully engineered to thwart. The 9-less messages went on for almost ten years. (If I were reporting this as an Internet vulnerability, I would dub it the "Nein Nines" attack; please forgive the linguistic muddle). But I was resigned to the likelihood that I would never know for sure.

And this brings us to the second observation from Strzok's book.

Compromised doesn't say anything about missing nueves, but he does mention that the FBI exploited a serious tradecraft error on the part of the sender: the FBI was able to tell when messages were and weren't being sent during the weekly timeslot when the suspect couple was observed in the room where they copied traffic. Even worse (for the illegals), empty message slots correlated perfectly with times that the suspect couple was traveling and not able to copy messages. This observation helped confirm the FBI's suspicions and ultimately led to their arrest and expulsion (along with the rest of the Russian illegals network).

Ironically, this was not the first time that Russian/Soviet intelligence has been burned by sloppy OTP practices. The first was, more famously, the disastrous re-use of OTPs discovered and exploited in the Venona intercepts.

One time pads can be a cryptographic landmine. They have a very attractive property - provable security! - but at the cost of unforgiving operational assumptions that can be hard to meet in practice. OTPs have long been a favorite of hucksters selling supposedly "unbreakable" encryption software. So remember this story next time someone tries to sell you their super-secure one-time-pad-based crypto scheme. If actual Russian spies can't use it securely, chances are neither can you.

Anyway, as they say on the radio...

FINAL
FINAL

According to Strzok, the IG was prepared to exonerate him in Clinton investigation until White House intervened.

Well, the publication of those text messages was damn inconvenient. //

It is the height of arrogance, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the structure of government, for anyone in the Executive Branch in general, and the FBI in particular — including Jim Comey — to think it was acceptable for them to consider the question of whether a duly elected President of the United States was a “threat” to national security.

By constitutional principle, and by virtue of the fundamental organization of the Executive, the President can NEVER be a threat to the national security of the United States because in the final analysis the President — and not the FBI Director or the Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence — is empowered to make the judgment about what is or is not in the national security interests of the United States. It is a fundamental part of his job to make that determination. As a subordinate, it is the FBI Director’s job to carry out US policy — not to express his own views on such policy or pursue matters in the manner in which he believes they should be pursued. //

On that day we grappled with an especially troubling question, one that none of us could have anticipated in our wildest imaginations: whether to open a counterintelligence case against the president himself.

In my opinion, even entertaining that question was a firing offense for everyone in the room. Their obligation under the Constitution was to take their concerns to the Executive, and make their views known. Then await instructions and do nothing. If no instructions came, then move on to something else. //

Substitute “top leadership of the FBI” in Strzok’s description with “top leadership of the Pentagon” and consider the same concerns. What are you then discussing? Right — a coup de etat. //

Later the NPR author quotes him as admitting he was “naive” about the possibility his communications with Page would become public.

“Naive”?? ROFLMAO.

Stupid, uninformed and ill-suited for his job are better descriptors.

Or, as has been said to me many times by people in the FBI I trust — agents who spend their career in counter-intelligence lack any perspective on the concept of “discoverable material” as it relates to criminal cases. They never undergo cross-examination where their words from a particular document are force-fed back to them by an effective cross-examiner. You only need to learn the lessons from that kind of embarrassment one time and then you realize the foolishness of committing thoughts to writing without first considering the degree to which you would be ready to stand behind those written words on a witness stand in front of a judge and jury.

How does the Woods File — stored electronically in the FBI’s Sentinel database — get “lost”? And at what point in time did the SCO decide it was necessary to “reconstruct” a replacement Woods File by reverse engineering it through analyzing the applications to determine the specific factual allegations needed source documentation — other than the Steele Memos — in order to justify their inclusion in the third application to extend.

Was the ACTUAL Woods File so lacking — or so dependent on the allegations of the Steele Memos — that someone in the SCO realized it was a “ticking time bomb” waiting to be uncovered once an authorized investigator was given the responsibility to sort things out? //

And now we have Sara Carter’s report that the “Woods File” for the Page FISA application was at some undetermined point in time “recreated” by the Special Counsel’s Office after the original file was “lost” in an electronic database that doesn’t “lose” things.

Obama administration holdovers and partisan career employees succeeded in causing the ouster of the new administration’s pick for national security advisor. //

Flynn’s fate, however, was sealed when Yates conveyed to the White House that Flynn had lied to Pence and had been questioned by the FBI. Even then, had Yates conveyed the truth—that the agents believed Flynn had not lied—the Trump administration might have resolved the situation differently.

Instead, though, Obama administration holdovers and partisan career employees succeeded in causing the ouster of the new administration’s pick for national security advisor. And that plot only succeeded because of illegally leaked classified intel. These facts shake the foundation of our constitutional republic and threaten the peaceful transitions of power, and will be a blot on our country’s history long after Flynn obtains some semblance of justice. //

Further, the targeting of Flynn was but one thread of the Obama-Biden administration’s attempt to interfere with the Trump administration. The spying on the transition team, the failure to provide Trump defensive briefings, the attempt to sidestep Trump’s attorneys general—successful with Jeff Sessions, but not Barr—and the weaponization of whistleblowing laws to impeach the duly elected president represent the most destructive attack on our government ever.

Former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty to falsifying a document to justify surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser as part of the 2016 investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election.

They gaslit the country.

Suggests Durham has a broad set of "targets." //

Clinesmith was a member of the FBI General Counsel’s Office (FBI OGC) who was assigned to work on the Crossfire Hurricane (CH) investigation. The function of FBI OGC attorneys is not expected to be surrogates or replacements for DOJ prosecutors with regard to criminal violations and investigative options, but to advise FBI investigators with respect to their compliance with FBI procedures and policies as they go about conducting investigations. Information contained in the IG report suggests that the FBI personnel conducting the CH investigation looked to Clinesmith for guidance and legal judgments outside what would normally be appropriate.

Clinesmith altered an email from the CIA in response to an inquiry from the CH investigators about the status of Carter Page’s relationship with the CIA. When the CH team was preparing the FISA application for Carter Page, it had already been reported publicly that Page claimed he had cooperated in the past with the CIA on contacts he had as part of his job with suspected members of Russian intelligence. When the CH team reached out to the CIA to confirm that information, the CIA responded with an email to Clinesmith. That message confirmed that Page had been a cooperative source of information for the CIA in the past — including a period of time being relied upon by the CH investigation to contend that Page was an “Agent of a Foreign Power” for FISA surveillance purposes. The email stated that Page was not currently in contact with the CIA, but that any information from him would be favorably received by the CIA.

This information from the CIA should have stopped the Page FISA application in its tracks. The CIA told the FBI that Page had been a friendly source of information in the past about Russian intelligence activities, and Page would be treated as a friendly source of intelligence in the future if he offered additional information. That was contrary to what the FISA application ended up representing to the FISC about Page’s status as a “Russian Agent.” Clinesmith certainly recognized the implications of the CIA communication, as he opened up the message in a way such that he could edit it, and he changed the language to make it say the exact opposite of what the CIA had reported to the CH. Clinesmith made it read that Page was NOT a friendly source of information for the CIA, and he forwarded the altered message to the CH case agent to be included in the Page FISA application.

  One important fact getting overlooked in all the discussion of whether FBI Attorney Kevin Clinesmith’s guilty plea represents the sacrifice of a minor criminal so the ringleaders can escape justice or the beginning of the end for those who were running the show is exactly whose show Clinesmith was a part of when the crime he’s admitted committing occurred.

FBI Internal "Talking Points" memo described plan to mislead Senate Intelligence Committee about reliability of sources for Steele memos //

A stunning FBI document was released by the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier today.

The document is titled “SSCI Briefing on Former Employee of Christopher Steele”, and subtitled “Draft Talking Points As Of 14 February 2018.”

A general characterization of the content of the document would be that it lays out ways to address the issue of the FBI’s knowledge of Steele’s “Primary Subsource”, now known to have been Igor Danchenko. A 57 page “electronic communication” detailing the late January 2017 interview of Danchenko, lasting over a period of 3 days, has previously been declassified and released by the Senate. I wrote about the contents of the EC here.

That “EC” revealed that Danchenko’s “network” of sources for the information he delivered to Steele was nothing more than childhood friends and drinking buddies, none of whom were in positions in Russia that brought them into the orbit of Russian intelligence services, or had access to any insider information from the Putin government as was portrayed in Steele’s memos.

https://www.redstate.com/shipwreckedcrew/2020/07/26/initial-thoughts-on-the-53-page-ec-of-steeles-primary-subsource-now-known-to-be-brookings-institute-analyst-igor-danchenko/ //

Coming a year after Danchenko had been interviewed, and after none of the most meaningfully claims made in the Steele memos based on Danchenko’s reporting had been verified or independently corroborated, to tell the Senate that the FBI had confidence in Danchenko’s information, that his sources had access to the type of information he was attributing to them, and that his work constituted reasonably sound tradecraft is duplicitous and dishonest beyond comprehension.

These weren't mistakes. //

The FBI said Thursday that the bureau found just two “material” errors in an audit of 29 applications to surveil American citizens, an error rate that pales in comparison to the 17 “significant” problems discovered in applications for surveillance orders against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

The primary source for the infamous Steele dossier was a business analyst from Russia who lived in Washington, the source’s attorney confirmed to The Epoch Times on July 26.

Following the lead of open-source reporting by internet sleuths, The Epoch Times identified and contacted the analyst, Igor Danchenko, on July 19, but received no response and refrained from publicizing his identity.

“Igor Danchenko has been identified as one of the sources who provided data and analysis to Orbis Business Intelligence,” March Schamel, Danchenko’s attorney, wrote in an email.

Orbis Business Intelligence is the company co-founded by former British intelligence office Christopher Steele. //

While Schamel did not say his client was Steele’s primary source, the confirmation that Danchenko is one of the sources is sufficient to establish that he is the primary source based on the recently declassified record of Danchenko’s January 2017 interview with the FBI.

Steele claimed that he based the vast majority of his dossier on reports from Danchenko, who in turn had a network of sub-sources. The dossier played a central role in the FBI’s decision to secure a warrant to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page in October 2016.

The Department of Justice inspector general determined that the FBI’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications were riddled with errors, some of the most egregious of which had to do with Steele falsifying and overhyping what he had learned from Danchenko. Steele also presented rumors Danchenko had passed on as credible claims.

The FBI interviewed Danchenko for three days in late January 2017. During the interview, Danchenko disputed some of the claims attributed to him in the dossier and told agents that allegations Steele had presented as credible were merely bar rumors.

The nature of the interview and how it came to happen are highly suggestive of the fact that Obama holders in DOJ and FBI wanted Steele's subsource to provide information directly to Crossfire Hurricane investigators.