That’s when former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr assigned Durham, a longtime Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut, to investigate how, in the middle of a heated presidential campaign and based upon scant evidence, the FBI came to suspect one of the candidates of being a clandestine agent of the Kremlin — to the point of opening counterintelligence and criminal investigations targeting Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Full Answer
· There is little doubt about the FBI’s investigation of Trump associates. Congressional investigators confirmed the FBI authorized surveillance of Carter Page under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Page, at the time, was a Trump campaign official working on foreign policy. He had multiple contacts with Russian intelligence ...
· Long before FBI computer contractor and Clinton operative Rodney L. Joffe allegedly trolled Internet traffic for dirt on President Trump, he mined direct-marketing contact lists for the names and addresses of unwitting Americans to target in a promotional scam involving a grandfather clock. Rodney Joffe: Back in the 1980s, this anti-Trump ...
Three years before Page became an adviser to the Trump campaign, he came to the attention of FBI counterintelligence agents, who learned that Russian spy …
President Donald Trump (L) shakes hands with James Comey, director of the FBI, during an Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on ...
Trump is the second president to fire an FBI director. The first [FBI director] was William Sessions in 1993 [who was dismissed by then-President Bill Clinton]. But there was little open feuding like today surrounding that decision.
When Harry Truman was president and allegedly was “soft on communism,” FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover secretly worked with congressional committees and Sen. Joe McCarthy to advance the anti-communist cause, but there was never a public rift between the FBI and the White House.
There was serious antagonism between the FBI and the White House during the Kennedy administration (over Director Hoover’s attitude toward the civil rights movement in general and Dr. [Martin Luther] King in particular).
The major theme in earlier FBI-White House relations was the tension between the presidents and an all-but-autonomous J. Edgar Hoover. Strong chief executives like FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and LBJ contained him pretty well, but there was constant tension.
The memo scandal is a move on behalf of the White House ... to tarnish the reputation of the FBI and of the Justice Department, and by extension call into doubt the motives of the Mueller investigation.
Regarding the current antagonism between the White House and FBI, there is no good historical precedent. Never has a president of the United States attacked the FBI so publicly. Furthermore, congressional committees with oversight responsibilities have also never openly attacked the FBI in this way.
However, that tension remained largely hidden, and no evidence has ever surfaced that the president tried to have Freeh fired.
It all started with a short memo, dated July 26, 1908, and signed by Charles J. Bonaparte, Attorney General, describing a “regular force of special agents” available to investigate certain cases of the Department of Justice. This memo is celebrated as the official birth of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—known throughout the world today as the FBI.
One of the first special agents credentials. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer responded with a massive investigation, led by a young Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover, who amassed detailed information and intelligence on radicals and their activities.
In Brooklyn, a nine-year-old Al Capone would soon start his life of crime. In Indianapolis, a five-year-old John Dillinger was growing up on his family farm. And in Chicago, a young child christened Lester Joseph Gillis—later to morph into the vicious killer “Baby Face” Nelson—would greet the world by year’s end.
The story is told, for example, of a Philadelphia agent who was for years allowed to split time between doing his job and tending his cranberry bog.
The anarchists, in a sense, were the first modern-day terrorists—banding together in small, isolated groups around the world; motivated by ideology; bent on bringing down the governments they hated. But they would, ironically, hasten into being the first force of federal agents that would later become the FBI.
Burke labeled that document—dated December 15, 1919 —“Identification Order No. 1.” In essence, it was the Bureau’s first wanted poster, and it put the organization squarely in the fugitive-catching business just eleven years into its history. It has been at it ever since.
In a complicated, political showdown with Congress, involving what lawmakers charged was Roosevelt’s grab for executive power, Congress banned the loan of Secret Service operatives to any federal department in May 1908.
WASHINGTON — He was the FBI agent so central to the Trump-Russia investigation that he came up with the code name: Crossfire Hurricane, from the lyrics of a Rolling Stones song that happened to be in his head.
Elijah Cummings, D-Md., speaks while aides hold up posters of people who have entered guilty pleas in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election before Peter Strzok, then deputy assistant director of the FBI, testified at a hearing on Capitol Hill on July 12, 2018. Joshua Roberts / Reuters file
That's why Strzok and his FBI colleagues took the historic step of opening a counterintelligence investigation into Trump after he fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017 — an investigation Strzok says he earlier had opposed. Comey's firing also led to the appointment of Mueller, a former director of the FBI, as special counsel.
Despite the cinematic title, Strzok reveals no new evidence that the president acted as a tool of Russia. But his insider account provides a detailed refutation of the notion that a group of anti-Trump denizens of the deep state cooked up the Russia "hoax," as Trump likes to call it, to take down a president they didn't support.
In his report, Mueller said he couldn't find enough evidence to bring criminal charges alleging such a conspiracy, even as he punted on the question of whether Trump obstructed justice. Whether crimes were committed is a different question from whether Russia had a hold over the president, however.
A recent assessment by the House Intelligence Committee, which has sought classified briefings on the matter, says the FBI " has not investigated counterintelligence risks arising from President Trump's foreign financial ties.".
But Mueller never did answer the question of whether Trump was "compromised" by Russia — he never even tried to, according to the massive report he issued describing his findings.
United States Attorney's Office, District of Connecticut/. Wikimedia. Many of them shared a strong bias against Trump. A registered Democrat, Clinesmith sent a number of anti-Trump political messages over the FBI’s computer system after Trump won in 2016.
In July 2018, he was suspended, without pay, for some 14 days for sending the improper messages. Then the IG referred him for investigation for altering the CIA document. Clinesmith resigned from the bureau in September 2019 before an internal disciplinary process could be completed.
In August, Clinesmith pleaded guilty to a single felony count of intentionally making a false statement by doctoring a CIA email to make it appear Page had not assisted the agency. He added the words “not a ‘source’” to the document.
After Trump won the 2016 election in an upset, Clinesmith worried the new Republican president would find out the FBI had monitored his campaign and that fingers would eventually point back to him.
They argue Kevin Clinesmith’s crime of altering a CIA document to obscure the fact that former Trump campaign aide Carter Page worked for U.S., not Russian, intelligence was a rare lapse in judgment by an overworked bureaucrat. It was not, his apologists say, part of any broader conspiracy to conceal exculpatory information from surveillance court judges, who never learned of Page’s history with the CIA before approving FBI warrants to wiretap him as a suspected Russian agent.
Added Swecker, “It was my belief that McCabe skated on the false statements indictment because Durham had bigger and better things to run against him.”
The little-noticed documents, which include never-before-seen exhibits, were submitted by Special Counsel John Durham and lawyers for Page, who has been granted time to address the court as a victim when it sentences Clinesmith Jan. 29 as part of a plea agreement.