The OIG Report which Democrats are endorsing, destroys a variety of the Democratic Party narratives related to the opening of Crossfire Hurricane. So lets dig into how this investigation started…
The Dems are celebrating the fact that the OIG Report found no documentary or testimonial evidence that proved that FBI Deputy Assistant Director Strzok & his team knowingly opened the investigation without an adequate predicate. Which is all the report says, Strzok didn’t confess…
It is extremely easy to open either a Preliminary or Full Investigation, almost any allegation that may indicate a crime or threat to national security occurred. So a determination that the OIG could not prove that is not surprising. Essentially the tip off from Alexander Downer the Australian Ambassador was adequate predicate to initiate an investigation. It means little more than that Downer is a well known friend of the Clintons & their projects, don’t be surprised if USA Durham finds his referral was planted to help his friends trigger an investigation of the Trump Campaign.
So essentially this finding means very little, it is very easy to open an investigation. The agents involved failed to confess that they didn’t have a good reason to investigate the members of the Trump Campaign. But the Democratic narrative claiming that the FBI did not investigate the Trump Campaign is disproven by the report.
This quote shows that when Peter Strzok opened the case, he opened an umbrella investigation on the Trump Campaign, not on a specific individual. From 7/31/16-8/10/16 it was the campaign that was the subject of the investigation. Only on 8/10/16 did the FBI open up cases on individuals instead of the campaign. Then opened another case on LTG Flynn on 8/16/16. All were members of the Trump Campaign when these cases were opened.
There is one reveal in this, someone in the FBI’s New York Field Office opened an investigation on 4/4/16 into Carter Page’s contacts with suspected Russian intel officers. When FBI agent Gaeta received the Steel Report in July 2016, he sent it to the NY Field Office not to headquarters. There are Strzok texts indicating that these NY agents buried the information about Page making it hard for him to find evidence against Page. The FBI “tasked” CHS’s & UCE’s to wear wires in conversations with Papadopoulos, Page, & an unidentified high-level Trump Campaign official who was not under investigation! So if he was not a subject of the investigation for his own actions, was he spied upon because he was a Trump Campaign official?
THe FBI agents involved also used a defensive briefing to try & gather intelligence against candidate Donald J. Trump & Flynn during the briefing. Creating an FD-302 after the briefing to record information for the case. This is an FBI supervisor using the pretext of briefing the candidate to interview or interrogate the candidate.
The FBI’s Office of General Counsel rejected a request for a FISA on 8/15/17 because there was not probable cause that he was a foreign agent. The CH team addressed this by securing portions of Steele Dossier. The FISA App relied upon 3 sources of information about Carter Page. The Steele Dossier and information from the Evgeny Buryakov case in NYC. Most interesting is that it included information from Carter Page meeting with Stephan Halper in early July 2016, before the investigation was started. How can the CH team consensually monitor meetings BEFORE they opened the CH investigation?
This leaves a very big question to resolve. If the NYFO was hiding their investigation from the HQ team, why was the HQ team sending Stephan Halper to investigate Carter Page months before they opened the investigation. Only 429 pages to go!