Unless you're name is Andrew Weissmann.captkirk said:I'm guessing the answer is "no"MouthBQ98 said:
Are prosecutors supposed to attempt to suborn perjury to attempt to win in court?
Obviously not.MouthBQ98 said:
Are prosecutors supposed to attempt to suborn perjury to attempt to win in court?
Yes. That looks like a screenshot of that section of the article.aggiehawg said:
This NY Times article is behind a paywall.
Does it really say this?
Quote:
Inside a London office building in early June, three investigators for the Justice Department's inspector general took a crucial step toward clearing the political fallout from the Russia investigation: They spent two days interviewing Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose now-infamous dossier of purported links between Trump associates and Russia ended up in the hands of the F.B.I. ahead of the 2016 election.
The investigators pored over Mr. Steele's old memos and his contemporaneous notes from meetings with F.B.I. agents in the fall of 2016, according to a person familiar with the investigation. They asked Mr. Steele to explain in detail how he had validated his sources inside Russia, how he communicated with them, and how he decided which of their claims to include in his reports. They spoke at length about Mr. Steele's work with the F.B.I. on other Russia-related investigations and his contacts with a senior Justice Department official.
The interview was a key step in the investigation by the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, into the facts underlying a bitter partisan feud: Did F.B.I. officials do anything wrong in 2016 when they sought to understand the Trump campaign's links to Russia including how they used information from Mr. Steele?
That question has hovered over the Russia inquiry for two years as President Trump and his allies repeatedly assailed the investigators who scrutinized him and his advisers. Attorney General William P. Barr, who has accused the F.B.I. of "spying" on the Trump campaign, has begun his own review that will include intelligence agencies as well.
But the investigation by Mr. Horowitz, who has maintained a reputation for being above the partisan fray, may have a better chance of being accepted across party lines as credible. Mr. Horowitz, who is expected to release a much-anticipated report of his findings in the coming weeks, is believed to be weighing whether to recommend that the Justice Department tighten rules for any future counterintelligence investigations of a presidential campaign, which was a novel dilemma in 2016, according to people familiar with aspects of his investigation.
Mr. Horowitz's previous scrutiny of law-enforcement actions in 2016 has provided fodder to both Republican and Democratic critics. He found fault with the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey for public comments in 2016 about the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server, but not with the decision to pass on charging her.
Mr. Horowitz also uncovered text messages between the F.B.I. employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page criticizing then-candidate Donald Trump. He sharply rebuked the pair but said he had found no evidence that the pair had acted with bias in the Clinton investigation.
At the center of Mr. Horowitz's current investigation is Mr. Steele and how the F.B.I. used his reporting in its investigation of the Trump campaign.
The president's allies have vilified Mr. Steele, whose sources said Mr. Trump's campaign was colluding with the Kremlin and that Russia has a compromising sexual video of Mr. Trump taken inside a Moscow hotel room. No evidence of such a recording has surfaced.
Mr. Trump's allies have sought to conflate the much broader Russia investigation with the dossier and have increased their attacks since the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, concluded that while the campaign welcomed and expected to benefit from Russia's election interference, the evidence did not prove any conspiracy.
Investigators working for Mr. Horowitz have asked witnesses about whether the F.B.I. properly opened the Russia investigation and how the bureau handled a pair of informants, including Mr. Steele, whose work was financed by Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Reuters first reported the investigators' interview of Mr. Steele. They have conducted more than 100 interviews and have begun drafting their report, Mr. Horowitz wrote to lawmakers last month.
Mr. Horowitz is expected to answer whether Mr. Steele's information played a role in opening the Russia investigation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane. Former law enforcement officials have insisted it did not, saying they opened the inquiry in July 2016. The Steele dossier did not reach the relevant agents until Sept. 19, 2016, nearly two months later, people familiar with the matter have said.
But the primary focus of the inspector general's inquiry is the role that Mr. Steele's information played in investigators' effort to obtain court permission to wiretap Carter Page, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved the application on Oct. 21, 2016, about a month after Mr. Page had left the campaign, and the wiretap order one of 1,559 the court issued that year was renewed three times in 2017, including twice by Trump-era Justice Department officials.
In August 2016, a month before agents on the Russia investigation received the Steele dossier, they had already started discussions with the Justice Department about seeking a wiretap order targeting Mr. Page, according to people familiar with the investigation's timeline. Agents identified Mr. Page as a potential conduit between the campaign and Moscow, if there was any, because he had close business ties to Russia, had traveled there in July after joining the campaign, and had been targeted as a potential recruit by Russian intelligence agents in 2013 yet did not seem concerned when the F.B.I. talked to him about it.
Still, the arrival of the dossier in September kicked the deliberations over whether to seek a wiretap order into a higher gear, according to people familiar with the Russia investigation. By adding further weight to their reasons to be suspicious of Mr. Page, Mr. Steele's information helped officials overcome bureaucratic reluctance stemming from fears that any leak of the existence of such a wiretap would be politically radioactive.
Agents sought a warrant, mentioning in their application a claim from the dossier: One of Mr. Steele's sources said that when Mr. Page was in Russia that July, he had supposedly met with the Kremlin-linked president of an energy firm and discussed energy cooperation between the United States and Russia and the prospects of lifting Western sanctions against the Kremlin related to its incursions in Ukraine.
Investigators flagged, in a lengthy footnote in the wiretap application, that Mr. Steele's research was funded by someone "likely looking for information that could be used to discredit" Mr. Trump's campaign. They did not specifically identify the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Trump's allies have called it an abuse to use political opposition research in a wiretap application, especially without naming its funders.
The F.B.I. has defended its use of the material, saying Mr. Steele was a veteran intelligence professional who had helped the bureau obtain credible information in previous investigations. The footnote was a sufficient red flag because it "highlights for the court that this could have been opposition research, that that's what the source was conducting," Sally Moyer, an F.B.I. lawyer, said in private congressional testimony last fall.
Mr. Horowitz is also scrutinizing a related issue: whether law-enforcement officials adequately took into account new information as they sought to renew the wiretap. It is not clear, for example, when the F.B.I. figured out for certain that the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign had funded Mr. Steele's research; investigators never updated the language describing his research in their three renewal applications.
Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.
But it remains unclear whether that source was the origin of any of the claims about Mr. Page that made it into the wiretap application and, if so, whether the F.B.I. ever told the surveillance court.
His investigators' questions suggest that the inspector general is exploring several additional lines of potential criticism of the F.B.I. They asked Mr. Steele whether the bureau was overly reliant on the Russian expertise of outsiders like him. Mr. Steele told them that he believed the F.B.I. probably was underequipped to judge the inherently murky intelligence he was relaying.
They also asked about Mr. Steele's relationship with Bruce Ohr, a senior Justice Department official who was not working on the Russia investigation. After the F.B.I. formally terminated its confidential source relationship with Mr. Steele because he had spoken to the media about what he was hearing from his sources inside Russia, Mr. Ohr functioned as an intermediary for subsequent informal communications as the bureau continued to scrutinize Trump-Russia ties, including attempting to verify other claims in Mr. Steele's dossier.
In all, the Page wiretap application has likely become among the most scrutinized wiretap applications in history. James Baker, the F.B.I. general counsel at the time, who also agreed to cooperate with the inspector general, would not comment on the substance of his interactions with Mr. Horowitz's inquiry but has said in other forums that F.B.I. officials knew that everything they did would be second-guessed.
During a congressional deposition last fall, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and a Trump ally, asked Mr. Baker why he took the unusual step of personally reviewing the original warrant application.
"I anticipated being sitting here in rooms like this down the road, I seriously did, and I knew that it was I knew that it was sensitive," Mr. Baker replied, according to a transcript. "I knew that it would be controversial."
Crap like this:aggiehawg said:
Can you read it? What else does it say?
Of course he wasn't concerned, he worked with the FBI to catch the Russian spies that targeted him.Quote:
Agents identified Mr. Page as a potential conduit between the campaign and Moscow, if there was any, because he had close business ties to Russia, had traveled there in July after joining the campaign, and had been targeted as a potential recruit by Russian intelligence agents in 2013 yet did not seem concerned when the F.B.I. talked to him about it.
Still, the arrival of the dossier in September kicked the deliberations over whether to seek a wiretap order into a higher gear, according to people familiar with the Russia investigation. By adding further weight to their reasons to be suspicious of Mr. Page, Mr. Steele's information helped officials overcome bureaucratic reluctance stemming from fears that any leak of the existence of such a wiretap would be politically radioactive.
That's a lie. Timing is off. Ohr was passing stuff on to the FBI long before September.Quote:
Mr. Horowitz is expected to answer whether Mr. Steele's information played a role in opening the Russia investigation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane. Former law enforcement officials have insisted it did not, saying they opened the inquiry in July 2016. The Steele dossier did not reach the relevant agents until Sept. 19, 2016, nearly two months later, people familiar with the matter have said.
Again, the timeline is wrong:Quote:
In August 2016, a month before agents on the Russia investigation received the Steele dossier, they had already started discussions with the Justice Department about seeking a wiretap order targeting Mr. Page, according to people familiar with the investigation's timeline. Agents identified Mr. Page as a potential conduit between the campaign and Moscow, if there was any, because he had close business ties to Russia, had traveled there in July after joining the campaign, and had been targeted as a potential recruit by Russian intelligence agents in 2013 yet did not seem concerned when the F.B.I. talked to him about it.
Still, the arrival of the dossier in September kicked the deliberations over whether to seek a wiretap order into a higher gear, according to people familiar with the Russia investigation. By adding further weight to their reasons to be suspicious of Mr. Page, Mr. Steele's information helped officials overcome bureaucratic reluctance stemming from fears that any leak of the existence of such a wiretap would be politically radioactive.
At least the Times appears to confirm that the FBI knew the Steele Dossier contained disinformation in January 2017, well before Comey's firing and Mueller's appointment.Quote:
They also asked about Mr. Steele's relationship with Bruce Ohr, a senior Justice Department official who was not working on the Russia investigation. After the F.B.I. formally terminated its confidential source relationship with Mr. Steele because he had spoken to the media about what he was hearing from his sources inside Russia, Mr. Ohr functioned as an intermediary for subsequent informal communications as the bureau continued to scrutinize Trump-Russia ties, including attempting to verify other claims in Mr. Steele's dossier.
That is outright fake newsVegasAg86 said:Crap like this:aggiehawg said:
Can you read it? What else does it say?Of course he wasn't concerned, he worked with the FBI to catch the Russian spies that targeted him.Quote:
Agents identified Mr. Page as a potential conduit between the campaign and Moscow, if there was any, because he had close business ties to Russia, had traveled there in July after joining the campaign, and had been targeted as a potential recruit by Russian intelligence agents in 2013 yet did not seem concerned when the F.B.I. talked to him about it.
Still, the arrival of the dossier in September kicked the deliberations over whether to seek a wiretap order into a higher gear, according to people familiar with the Russia investigation. By adding further weight to their reasons to be suspicious of Mr. Page, Mr. Steele's information helped officials overcome bureaucratic reluctance stemming from fears that any leak of the existence of such a wiretap would be politically radioactive.
They had no reasons to be suspicious of Page. Steele's dossier didn't add further weight, it was the only weight.
aggiehawg said:
At least the Times appears to confirm that the FBI knew the Steele Dossier contained disinformation in January 2017, well before Comey's firing and Mueller's appointment.
ETA: Thanks, drcrinum.
They lied to the FISA court.VegasAg86 said:aggiehawg said:
At least the Times appears to confirm that the FBI knew the Steele Dossier contained disinformation in January 2017, well before Comey's firing and Mueller's appointment.
ETA: Thanks, drcrinum.
How did they get any renewals of the FISA after they knew the dossier was fake? How did they get around the requirement that a FISA had to bear fruit to be renewed?
No doubt. How are the judges not going ballistic? What would have happened to you if you presented something like that to a federal court? Judges don't like to be misled, let alone flat out lied to.aggiehawg said:They lied to the FISA court.VegasAg86 said:aggiehawg said:
At least the Times appears to confirm that the FBI knew the Steele Dossier contained disinformation in January 2017, well before Comey's firing and Mueller's appointment.
ETA: Thanks, drcrinum.
How did they get any renewals of the FISA after they knew the dossier was fake? How did they get around the requirement that a FISA had to bear fruit to be renewed?
In federal court? At the least severely reprimanded. At worst, my ability to practice in that District's federal courts would be revoked. (Just because one is licensed by the State Bar doesn't mean one is automatically admitted to the federal bar. Still have to take a separate test.) My state court license would likely be unaffected unless the offense was so grievous or there were repeated instances warranting that action.Quote:
What would have happened to you if you presented something like that to a federal court? Judges don't like to be misled, let alone flat out lied to.
Quote:
....So with Flynn's cooperation now at issue in the secondary EDVA case, in the primary case against Flynn himself, Judge Sullivan (Washington, DC) wants some answers:
Quote:
...So when Flynn was confronted by DOJ-NSD head David Laufman, he was being *interviewed* by a DOJ official who knew more about the contract initiator than Flynn did. The DOJ-NSD and David Laufman was involved because manipulating FARA violations was the method to conduct surveillance (SEE HERE).
David Laufman then pressured Flynn in January 2017 to sign the FARA submission, knowing it contained material that was false, but unbeknownst to Flynn. This later became the predicate for the FARA case against Flynn and Rafiekian.
However, there's a twist as highlighted by the Judge Trenga order.
The DOJ (Laufman first) knew the background of the FARA filing was false because they had conducted a FISA Title-1 investigation prior to the Flynn FARA submission; and the DOJ (Mueller team now in 2017) knew the Turkish government was behind the lobbying contract..
.But the DOJ cannot tell the court how they knew the lobbying contract was from the Turkish government, because they didn't want to reveal the FISA surveillance; AND the DOJ may have an additional interest in hiding their knowledge of their origination of the lobbying contract by the Turkish government, because it might have been somewhat coordinated by the Obama White House (pro-brotherhood, and pro-Erdogan).
https://dailycaller.com/2019/07/09/felix-sater-perjury-glenn-simpson/Quote:
House Intel Committee Witness Accuses Fusion GPS Founder Of Perjury
Democrats sought an interview with Sater to discuss whether the Kremlin could have any leverage over President Donald Trump due to his business dealings in Russia. Sater worked closely with former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen from October 2015 through June 2016 on a failed bid to build a Trump-themed skyscraper in Moscow.
Sater told reporters during his break that the interview covered little in the way of new information about his links to Trumpworld that have not already trickled out in the press, or in the special counsel's report.
But he added: "We did cover a new topic."
Asked what the topic was, Sater said, "Glenn Simpson perjuring himself at the Judiciary Committee on two occasions."
When asked what topic Simpson might have perjured himself on, Sater replied: "Me, specifically, and the fact that that's what motivated him to start investigating, when it was actually the fact that he was working for Veselnitskaya, if anybody knows that."
Sater was referring to Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who attended an infamous June 9, 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr. Veselnitskaya was also with Simpson on behalf of a Russian company called Prevezon Holdings, which opposed U.S. sanctions against Russia.
"That's the closest to Russia you're going to get, is Glenn Simpson," said Sater, who has worked for decades as an informant for U.S. government agencies, including the CIA and FBI.
Simpson's work for Veselnitskaya has largely been ignored in the two-plus years of reporting on Russiagate. At the same time Simpson was working for Russian interests, he was also working on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC to investigate Trump's ties to Russia. The result of that project was the infamous Steele dossier, written by former British spy Christopher Steele.
Quote:
The Justice Department's office of the inspector general has conducted more than 100 interviews and reviewed over 1 million records as part of its investigation of the FBI's use of the FISA process to surveil the Trump campaign, according to a letter obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
In a letter sent to four congressional committees on June 25, Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, said that investigators have made "substantial progress" in the probe, and that "our investigative work is nearing completion."
"[W]e have been in the process of drafting our report for some time," he wrote, adding that investigators "have been pursuing opportunities to meet with additional witnesses to ensure that our review is thorough and complete."
On March 28, 2018, Horowitz began investigating whether the FBI complied with legal requirements in obtaining surveillance warrants against Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser. The bureau relied heavily on the infamous and unverified Steele dossier in its applications for the warrants, which were issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
I assume pursuant to oversight authority on whether Trump obstructed justice since Mueller left the door open.Quote:
On what basis are they being called?
This is the cover Mueller needed to cancel his July 17th testimony.MouthBQ98 said:
Looks a little more like the judge was angry they were making public statements that might taint court proceedings because they hadn't been made in the courtroom yet, or established and supported. I guess it was more directed at preserving the objectivity of the jury pool.
