credit: sundance at cth
Michael Flynn’s defense attorney appears for a brief interview with Sean Hannity to discuss the recently unsealed documents showing FBI strategic planning to target Lt. Gen Flynn prior to their interview on January 24, 2017. WATCH:
A few notes of caution. Don’t fall into the outrage trap; the DOJ will certainly justify the FBI notes as a valid discussion on investigative strategy, nothing more.
Second, Bill Barr did not appoint Missouri Attorney Jensen in an effort to support General Flynn. AG Barr was ordered by the FISA court to review every case and all evidence that touched upon the fraudulent Carter Page FISA application. Be careful about projecting a motive onto Bill Barr around these revelations. Without that FISC ordered sequestration review order; the DOJ/FBI may not have moved on this.
Lastly, despite the known corruption within the existing FBI leadership{outlined here}, and we can now add the FBI hiding these documents for 3 years, AG Bill Barr continues to pour effusive praise upon the FBI. That reality doesn’t reconcile with a good intent.
When the FISA Court responded to the DOJ Inspector General report in December and January 2020 they requested an action plan from the DOJ and FBI to respond to the issues raised about misrepresentations to the court.
The DOJ/FBI replied to the FISA Court admitting the last two FISA renewals (April, June ’17) used against Carter Page were insufficiency predicated while withholding opinion on the original application (Oct ’16) and first renewal (Jan ’17).
To address the consequences of fraudulently obtained FISA warrants the DOJ and FBI informed the court they would begin a process to “sequester” all collected evidence from all four FISA warrants. [FISA COURT LINK]
Sequestering the evidence is essentially a search for what investigative material the FISA warrants were used to obtain; ie. the search for the fruit of the poisoned tree; and then a review of all DOJ/FBI cases that may have utilized that investigative material.
In late January the DOJ contacted the FISA court and asked for an extension to the deadline. The FISA court granted an extension until February 5th [LINK] The final response from the DOJ has not been declassified or released by the FISC for public review.
However, with media reporting of AG Barr using “outside prosecutors” to review current, former and ongoing cases, it simply makes sense this ‘outsider’ effort is part of the DOJ/FBI sequestration review.
If you consider that several DOJ offices may be involved with the material under review, including the Southern District of New York; The Eastern District of New York; The Eastern District of Virginia; The Washington DC District, and even Main Justice itself; it makes sense that outside DOJ personnel would be needed for this review.Additionally, all of the various FBI field offices who may have used the FISA authorizations as the underpinning evidence to gain separate Title-1 and/or Title-3 warrants, wiretaps or National Security Letters, in their various investigative cases would also need to be reviewed. This is an aspect the media is not discussing while they write opinions about AG Bill Barr bringing in outside DOJ attorneys.
The media are framing the use of outside attorneys as Bill Barr working on behalf of President Trump to undermine current and former prosecutions. However, understanding the FISC order requiring the sequestration effort, the use of outsiders is absolutely necessary.
The same U.S. Attorneys, prosecutors and FBI agents who used evidence gathered from the FISA warrants cannot be the same attorneys, agents and prosecutors making decisions about what parts of the warrants were used to gather evidence and how each part of any case was assembled by the use therein. It is a simple matter of a conflict of interest.
Additionally, the Robert Mueller team of FBI investigators and special counsel prosecutors certainly used the fraudulently obtained FISA warrants as part of their investigative evidence collection. Common sense would tell us this had to be the case or the FBI and Mueller team would not have requested renewals of the FISA warrant.
If the FBI & Special Counsel were not using the FISA warrant(s) to capture information, they would not have needed them renewed. Despite media spin to the contrary, the simple truth of renewals holding investigative value is evident in the renewal itself (ie. common sense).
Under this rather extensive effort to find exactly which investigations -over the course of three years- were touched directly, or indirectly, by the four FISA warrants; and/or which investigative paths may have been influenced downstream or enhanced -by varying degrees of importance- by evidence stemming from the FISA warrants; a reasonable person could see how AG Bill Barr would need to put a team together to retrace the investigative steps and make the sequestration determinations.
Obviously, for reasons of biased intent, corporate left-wing media would like to ignore why outside prosecutors are needed under this framework. Ignored in part because honest reporting would require an admission the FISA warrants were fraudulently obtained; and in part because the left-wing media have never informed the public of the DOJ/FBI sequestration effort in the first place. Likely more than half the country has no idea the DOJ and FBI have been told to go find the material.
There have been numerous articles, thousands of words, and endless hours of pundit protestations about Bill Barr using outside DC lawyers to review all of the previous DOJ Attorney activities; yet not a single time have they ever acknowledged the originating order from the FISA court requiring the DOJ/FBI to conduct the review. Imagine that?
New York Times – Mr. Barr has also installed a handful of outside prosecutors to broadly review the handling of other politically sensitive national-security cases in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, the people said. The team includes at least one prosecutor from the office of the United States attorney in St. Louis, Jeff Jensen, who is handling the Flynn matter, as well as prosecutors from the office of the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen. (more)
Likewise, considering AG Barr has been ordered by the court to review all the targets, cases and evidence, we should not be projecting an altruistic “clean up” effort…
Arguably, one could say Barr is being forced to reopen, and revisit, all of this material. Certainly Bill Barr would not willingly expose the corrupt intents of his friends Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein…. So we should watch carefully.
It would certainly be ironic if the FISA court ends-up in 2020 as the least corrupt institution within a DC network fraught with institutional corruption.
When it comes to DC politics, we cannot be too cynical.
Remember James Wolfe?…