Here’s another Sunday cross post some piece you may find
interesting or fascinating. Again YOU may have read, BUT I’m guessing many have
not read.
The theme of Solomon’s piece is the FISA warrant standards presented
to the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to look at Carter Page and George Papadopoulos did NOT include
the exculpatory evidence a FISC Judge probably would have denied a warrant.
JRH 3/17/19
Your generosity is always appreciated:
******************
The damning proof of innocence that FBI likely withheld
in Russian probe
By JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR
03/14/19 04:00 PM EDT
If President Trump declassifies
evidence in the Russia investigation, Carter Page’s summer bike ride to a
Virginia farm and George Papadopoulos’s hasty academic jaunt to London may
emerge as linchpin proof of FBI surveillance abuses during the 2016 election.
The two trips have received scant attention. But growing
evidence suggests both Trump campaign advisers made exculpatory statements — at
the very start of the FBI’s investigation — that undercut the Trump-Russia
collusion theory peddled to agents by Democratic sources.
The FBI plowed ahead anyway with an unprecedented intrusion
into a presidential campaign, while keeping evidence of the two men’s innocence
from the courts.
Page and Papadopoulos, who barely knew each other, met
separately in August and September 2016 with Stefan Halper,
the American-born Cambridge University professor who, the FBI told Congress,
worked as an undercover informer in the Russia case.
Papadopoulos was the young aide that the FBI used to justify
opening a probe into the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016, after he
allegedly told a foreign diplomat that
he knew Russia possessed incriminating emails about Hillary Clinton.
Page, a volunteer campaign adviser, was the American the FBI
then targeted on Oct. 21, 2016, for secret surveillance while investigating
Democratic Party-funded allegations that he secretly might have coordinated
Russia’s election efforts with the Trump campaign during a trip to Moscow.
To appreciate the significance of the two men’s interactions
with Halper, one must understand the rules governing the FBI when it seeks
a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
warrant such as the one secured against Page.
First, the FBI must present evidence to FISA judges that it
has verified and that comes from intelligence sources deemed reliable. Second,
it must disclose any information that calls into question the credibility of
its sources. Finally, it must disclose any evidence suggesting the innocence of
its investigative targets.
Thanks to prior releases of information,
we know the FBI fell short on the first two counts. Multiple FBI officials have
testified that the Christopher Steele dossier had not been verified when
its allegations were submitted as primary evidence supporting the FISA warrant
against Page.
Likewise, we know the FBI failed to tell the courts that
Steele admitted to a federal official that he was desperate to defeat
Trump in the 2016 election and was being paid by Clinton’s campaign and
the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to gather dirt on the
GOP candidate. Both pieces of information are the sort of credibility-defining
details that should be disclosed about a source.
What remains uncertain in the court of public opinion is
whether the FBI possessed evidence suggesting Papadopoulos and Page — and,
thus, the larger Trump campaign — were innocent of collusion. Republican
lawmakers have suggested for months that such evidence existed and was hidden
from the courts, but none has emerged in public.
My reporting from more than two dozen sources, many with
access to the FBI’s evidence, suggests one answer to that question lies in
Halper’s interactions with the two Trump campaign advisers, some of it
documented in FBI records. And interviews with both men reveal just how much
they told Halper about their innocence.
Page, an avid biker, rode his mountain bike on Aug. 20,
2016, to a Northern Virginia farm after being invited there by Halper for a
casual Saturday visit. Page met Halper weeks earlier when invited by Halper’s
assistant to a Cambridge academic
conference. The two corresponded by email around the time of Page’s
trip to Moscow and arranged to meet in Virginia.
By the time Page arrived at Halper’s farm, he had been
rattled by media calls during the prior week in which reporters alleged having
information that Page met with two senior Russian intelligence figures in
Moscow. The reporters suggested his trip might have been part of a larger plot
to coordinate with Russia to benefit Trump’s election as president.
That allegation, it turns out, was one of many in the
uncorroborated Steele dossier guiding the FBI’s collusion probe.
Page told me he was incredulous at the suggestions and told
everyone he knew, including Halper, that he had not met either Russian intel figure
and knew of no Trump-Moscow coordination.
“I’m certain that nothing I said that day at the professor’s
farm could be deemed as anything other than exculpatory. And once again, in
September, I explained reality to the FBI. Contrary to the DNC’s false reports,
I have never met those Russians, and I did not know of any effort to
coordinate, collude or conspire with Russia. Period.”
Page said he went to Moscow in July 2016 simply to give a speech,
at the same university where former President Obama spoke a few years earlier.
And he said he consciously did not take any actions with Russians that might
raise concerns, especially after helping U.S. prosecutors and the FBI in
an earlier Russian criminal
case and meeting with federal authorities as recently as the
previous March.
“I’ve never done anything even vaguely resembling illegality
throughout the countless trips to Russia. But I was exceptionally meticulous
that trip to carefully avoid anything that could be remotely construed as
questionable,” he told me.
Page’s recollection is backed up by a letter he sent to
then-FBI Director James Comey a few weeks
after his Halper meeting. “For the record, I have not met this year with any
sanctioned official in Russia, despite the fact that there are no restrictions
on U.S. persons speaking with such individuals,” he wrote in September 2016.
Multiple sources tell me none of the FISA applications the
FBI submitted to judges over the course of a year’s surveillance of Page made
any mention of exculpatory statements or protestations of innocence that Page
made to informants.
If such statements exist, in the form of a tape or a
transcript or an FBI interview report — three routine investigative tools the
FBI uses when managing informers — then it would be a huge omission that likely
violated FBI rules.
A month later, in London, Papadopoulos was paid $3,000 to
present a foreign policy paper to Halper. On the second day of his visit with Halper,
Papadopoulos said the conversation turned from academic work to a barrage of
questions about Russia, Trump and collusion, including whether the Trump
campaign had conspired with Russia on the hacked Clinton emails or changed the
GOP platform on Ukraine to appease Vladimir Putin.
Papadopoulos told me he pointedly remembers his response: “I
made it clear to Halper that what he was suggesting did not only amount to
treason, but that I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about and had no
information at all about anyone involved with the campaign who might have been
involved with a conspiracy because there never was a conspiracy and no one was
colluding with a foreign power, especially Russia.
“Furthermore, I made it clear to him that Ukraine should be
supported and that Russia will always remain a competitor, even if Trump
decided to work with Russia to stabilize Syria and East Ukraine while checking
China’s rise.”
Sources familiar with the FISA applications say they contain
no evidence that Papadopoulos made exculpatory statements unwittingly to an FBI
informer.
Again, if such statements exist in transcripts, tapes or FBI
reports, they’re a major omission.
Page never has been charged with
wrongdoing. And Papadopoulos, after an exhaustive investigation by special
counsel Robert Mueller, was not accused
of conspiracy with Russia; instead, he pleaded guilty to making a false
statement to the FBI about a months-old conversation with Australian diplomat
Alexander Downer regarding a rumor that Russia possessed embarrassing emails
from Clinton.
The crime was deemed so minor by the presiding judge that
Papadopoulos was sentenced to a mere 14 days in
jail.
If Page’s and Papadopoulos’s recollections of what they told
Halper are accurate, former FBI officials Comey, James Baker, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok — all of whom
played a role in the Russia probe and the FISA warrants — have some serious
explaining to do. So does departing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who signed the fourth and final FISA
warrant.
My reporting suggests a much bigger scandal — the
intentional misleading of the nation’s federal intelligence court — soon may
eclipse the Russia narrative that has dominated the media the past two years.
The fastest way to know if that storm is on the horizon is
for Trump to declassify the documents showing
exactly how the FBI behaved in this case.
___________________
John Solomon is an
award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed
U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal
scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and
numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist
and executive vice president for video at The Hill.
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