The Hill: Senators upset with Horowitz's findings on Trump team warrants
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/474388-senators-zero-in-on-shadowy-court-at-center-of-ig-report
The FISA "Star Chamber" judges rubber-stamped applications for electronic eavesdropping warrants 99.8 percent of the time, records show -- demonstrating that there is very little effort made by the Star Chamber judges to examine these applications for proper safeguards.
A track record of 99.8 percent in favor of the government shows that the public's rights are not protected by the system. Hence, it is understandable that intelligence bureaucrats had come to believe that it didn't really matter what was in the applications and slipped over into the cavalier abuse of power. "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely," as the saying goes.
So in that light, the litany of horrendous "errors" in the applications is, in hindsight, predictable. But many wonder that if such abuses can occur with respect to a presidential campaign, what are the chances of ordinary Americans caught up in the shadowy world of intelligence warrants?
Others argue that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court has been unconstitutional since the day it was authorized in 1978.
Libertarian senators, who have always opposed FISA, are winning grudging agreement from conservative "hawks" on the dangers of the shadowy system.
It was the FISA court that secretly rubber-stamped the Obama administration's vast increase in warrantless telephone surveillance revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. As House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi was one of the "gang of four" lawmakers who were told about this Executive Branch "law" but made no public complaint.
During the Snowden upheaval, Pelosi sidestepped responsibility by saying she had not been adequately informed. Yet she did not stir up colleagues to launch articles of impeachment against President Obama for what was a blatant and far-reaching abuse of power that went to the heart of the democratic process.
Barr finds 24 areas of concern in Spygate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_0e_VdV_Wo
Attorney General sees threat to democracy in FISA abuses
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRKFo0JmuBc
Nunes blasts FISA judges as peril to democracy
"We cannot support the FISA court," Devin Nunes, minority leader of the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News. "The judges are refusing to take action against the dirty cops and dirty lawyers who did this," he said, referring to the abuses listed by IG Michael Horowitz, many of which Nunes exposed in 2017. "Remember this is a secret court," he said. "The judges on the FISA court are putting the American people in danger" by a reckless disregard for fourth amendment safeguards.
Nunes: 'We cannot support the FISA court'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS9IZTo3rjo
Bombshell FISA abuses bared
17 'basic and fundamental' errors in warrants to spy on Trump campaign
¶ The Justice Department Inspector General has sharply criticized the FBI's surveillance rules, while identifying 17 major errors in spy court applications to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign. The IG and his staff also found numerous other errors related to the application process. And while IG Michael Horowitz said he could not prove a political motive behind the FISA warrants, he was disturbed that so many egregious mistakes occurred in applications that strongly affected a rival politician's campaign. The IG also found that Justice Department official Bruce Ohr should have known better than to act as a conduit between FBI officials and Christopher Steele, whose poorly sourced "raw data" dossier was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
¶ Following is an excerpt from that report. (I have revised paragraphing as a means of aiding readership but have not changed anything in the report, of course, other than to add one comment in square braces and to add emphases as an aid to the reader.)
IG report lists serious errors against Trump team
As more fully described in Chapter Five, based upon the information known to the FBI in October 2016, the first application contained the following seven significant inaccuracies and omissions:
1. Omitted information the FBI had obtained from another U.S. government agency detailing its prior relationship with Page, including that Page had been approved as an "operational contact" for the other agency from 2008 to 2013, and that Page had provided information to the other agency concerning his prior cont acts with certain Russian intelligence officers, one of which overlapped with facts asserted in the FISA application;
2. Included a source characterization statement asserting that Steele's prior reporting had been "corroborated and used in criminal proceedings," Executive Summary Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation which overstated the significance of Steele's past reporting and was not approved by Steele's handling agent, as required by the Woods Procedures;
3. Omitted information relevant to the reliability of Person 1, a key Steele sub-source (who was attributed with providing the information in Report 95 and some of the information in Reports 80 and 102 relied upon in the application), namely that ( 1) Steele himself told members of the Crossfire Hurricane team that Person 1 was a "boaster" and an "egoist" and " may engage in some embellishment" and (2) the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation on Person 1 a few days before the FISA application was filed;
4. Asserted that the FBI had assessed that Steele did not directly provide to the press information in the September 23 Yahoo News article based on the premise that Steele had told the FBI that he only shared his election-related research with the FBI and Fusion GPS, his client; this premise was incorrect and contradicted by documentation in the Woods File-Steele had told the FBI that he also gave his information to the State Department;
5. Omitted Papadopoulos's consensually monitored statements to an FBI CHS in September 2016 denying that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was collaborating with Russia or with outside groups like Wikileaks in the release of emails;
6. Omitted Page's consensually monitored statements to an FBI CHS in August 2016 that Page had "literally never met" or "said one word to" Paul Manafort and that Manafort had not responded to any of Page's emails; if true, those statements were in t ension with claims in Report 95 that Page was participating in a conspiracy with Russia by acting as an intermediary for Manafort on behalf of the Trump campaign; and
7. Included Page's consensually monitored statements to an FBI CHS in October 2016 that the FBI believed supported its theory that Page was an agent of Russia but omitted other statements Page made that were inconsistent with its theory, including denying having met with Sechin and Divyekin, or even knowing who Divyekin was; if true, those statements contradicted the claims in Report 94 that Page ix had met secretly with Sechin and Divyekin about future cooperation with Russia and shared derogatory information about candidate Clinton. None of these inaccuracies and omissions were brought to the attention of OI before the last FISA application was filed in June 2017.
Consequently, these failures were repeated in all three renewal applications. Further, as we discuss lat er, we identified 10 additional significant errors in the renewa l applications. The fa ilure to provide accurate and complete information to the OI Att orney concerning Page's prior relationship with another U.S. government agency (item 1 above) was particularly concerning because t he OI Attorney had specifically asked the case agent in late September 2016 whether Carter Page had a current or prior relationship with the other agency. In response to that inquiry, the case agent advised the OI Attorney that Page's relationship was "dated" (claiming it was when Page lived in Moscow in 2004-2007) and "outside scope." This representation, however, was contrary to information that the other agency had provided to the FBI in August 2016, which stated that Page was approved as an " operational contact" of the other agency from 2008 to 2013 (after Page had left Moscow).
Moreover, rather than being "outside scope," Page's status with the other agency overlapped in time with some of the interactions between Page and known Russian intell igence officers that were relied upon in t he FISA applications to establish probable cause. Indeed, Page had provided information to the other agency about his past contacts with a Russian Intelligence Officer (Intelligence Officer 1), which were among t he historical connections to Russian intelligence officers that the FBI relied upon in t he first FISA application (and subsequent renewal applications). According t o the information from the other agency, an employee of the other agency had assessed that Page "candidly described his contact with" Intelligence Officer 1 to the other agency. Thus, the FBI relied upon Page's contacts with Intelligence Officer 1, among others, in support of its probable cause statement in the FISA application, while failing to disclose to OI or the FISC that (1) Page had been approved as an operat ional contact by the other agency during a five-year period that overlapped with allegations in the FISA application, (2) Page had disclosed to the other agency contacts that he had with I ntelligence Officer 1 and certain other individuals, and (3) the other agency's employee had given a positive assessment of Page's candor.
Further, we were concerned by the FBI's inaccurate assertion in the application that Steele's prior reporting had been "corroborated and used in criminal Executive Summary Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation proceedings," which we were told was primarily a reference to Steele's role in the FIFA corruption investigation. We found that t he team had speculated that Steele's prior reporting had been corroborated and used in cri minal proceedings without clearing the representation with Steele's handling agent, as required by the Woods Procedures. According to the handling agent, he would not have approved the representation in the application because only "some" of Steele's prior reporting had been corroborated-most of it had notand because Steele's information was never used in a criminal proceeding. We concluded that these failures created the inaccurate impression in the applications that at least some of Steele's past reporting had been deemed sufficiently reliable by prosecutors to use in court, and that more of his information had been corroborated than was actually the case.
We found no evidence that the OI Attorney, NSD supervisors, ODAG officials, or Yates were made aware of these issues before the first application was submitted to the court. Although we also found no evidence that Corney had been made aware of these issues at the time he certified the application, as discussed in our analysis in Chapter Eleven, multiple factors made it difficult for us to precisely determine the extent of FBI leadership's knowledge as to each fact that was not shared with OI and not included, or inaccurately stated, in the FISA applications. These factors included, among other things, limited recollections, the inability to question Corney or refresh his recollection with relevant, classified documentation because of his lack of a security clearance, and the absence of meeting minutes that would show the specific details shared with Corney and McCabe during briefings they received, beyond the more general investigative updates that we know they were provided.
FBI Activities After the First FISA Application and FBI Efforts to Assess Steele's Election Reporting On October 31, 2016, shortly after the first FISA application was signed, an article entitled "A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump," was published by Mother Jones. Steele admitted to the FBI that he was a source for the article, and the FBI closed him as a CHS for cause in November 2016. However, as we describe below, despite having been closed for cause, the Crossfire Hurricane team continued to obtain information from Steele through Ohr, who met with the FBI on 13 occasions to pass along information he had been provided by Steele.
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In Chapter Six, we describe the events t hat followed Steele's closing as a CHS, including the FBI's receipt of information from several third parties who had acquired copies of the Steele election reports, use of information from the Steele reports in an interagency assessment of Russian interference in the U.S. 2016 elections, and continuing efforts to learn about Steele and his source network and to verify information from the reports following Steele's closure. Starting in December 2016, FBI staff participated in an interagency effort to assess the Russian government's intentions and actions concerning the 2016 U.S. elections.
We learned that whether and how to present Steele's reporting in the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) was a topic of significant discussion between the FBI and the other agencies participat ing in it. According to FBI staff, as the interagency editing process for the ICA progressed, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) expressed concern about the lack of vetting for the Steele election reporting and asserted it did not merit inclusion in the body of the report. An FBI Intel Section Chief told us the CIA viewed it as "internet rumor." In contrast, as we describe in Chapter Six, the FBI, including Corney and McCabe, sought to include the reporting in the ICA. Limited information from the Steele reporting ultimately was presented in an appendix to the ICA.
FBI efforts to verify information in the Steele election reports, and to learn about Steele and his source network continued after Steele's closure as a CHS. In November and December 2016, FBI officials travelled abroad and met with persons who previously had professional contacts with St eele or had knowledge of his work. Information these FBI officials obtained about Steele was both positive and negative. We found, however, that the information about Steele was not placed in his FBI CHS file. We further learned that the FBI's Validation Management Unit (VMU) completed a human source validation review of Steele in early 2017. The VMU review found that Steele's past criminal reporting was "minimally corroborated," and included this finding in its report that was provided to the Crossfire Hurricane team. This determination by the VMU was in tension with the source characterization statement included in the initial FISA application, which rep
Management Unit (VMU) completed a human source validation review of Steele in early 2017. The VMU review found that Steele's past criminal reporting was "minimally corroborated," and included this finding in its report that was provided to the Crossfire Hurricane team. This determination by the VMU was in tension with the source characterization statement included in the initial FISA application, which represented that Steele's prior reporting had been "corroborated and used in criminal proceedings." The VMU review also did not identify any corroboration for Steele's election reporting among the information that the Crossfire Hurricane team had collected. However, the VMU did not include this finding in its written validation report Executive Summary Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation and therefore members of the Crossfire Hurricane team and FBI executives were unaware of it.
We also found that the FBI's interviews of Steele, his Primary Sub-source, a second sub-source, and other investigative activity, revealed potentially serious problems with Steele's descriptions of information in his reports. For example, as detailed in Chapters Six and Eight, the Primary Sub-source made st atements during his/her January 2017 FBI interview that were inconsistent with multiple sections of the Steele reports, including some that were relied upon in the FISA applications. Among other things, regarding the allegations attri buted to Person 1, the Primary Subsource's account of t hese communications, if true, was not consistent with and, in fact, contradicted the allegations of a "well-developed conspiracy" in Reports 95 and 102 attributed to Person 1. We further determined t hat the Crossfire Hurricane team was unable to corroborate any of the specific substantive allegations regarding Carter Page contained in Steele's election reporting which the FBI relied on in the FISA applications.
We were told by the Supervisory Intel Analyst that, as of September 2017, the FBI had corroborated limited information in the Steele election reporting, and much of that was publicly available information. Most relevant to the Carter Page FISA applications, the allegations contained in Reports 80, 94, 95, and 102, which were relied upon in all four applications, remained uncorroborated and, in several instances, were inconsistent with information gathered by the Crossfire Hurricane team. The Three Renewal Applicat ions for Continued FI SA Authority on Carter Page. As noted above, the FBI filed three renewal applications with the FISC, on January 12, April 7, and June 29, 2017. In addition to repeating the seven significant errors contained in the first FISA application and outlined above, we identified 10 additional
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significant errors in the three renewal applications, based upon information known to the FBI after the first application and before one or more of the renewals. We describe the circumstances surrounding these 10 errors in Chapter Eight, and provide a chart list ing additional errors in Appendix One. As more fully described in Chapter Eight, the renewal applications:
8. Omitted the fact that Steele's Primary Subsource, who the FBI found credible, had made statements in January 2017 raising significant questions about the reliability of allegations included in the FISA applications, including, for example, that he/she did not recall any discussion wit h Person 1 concerning Wikileaks and there was "nothing bad" about the communications between the Kremlin and the Trump team, and that he/she did not report to Steele in July 2016 that Page had met with Sechin;
9. Omitted Page's prior relationship with another U.S. government agency, despite being reminded by the other agency in June 2017, prior to the fil ing of the fi nal renewal application, about Page's past st atus with that other agency; instead of including this information in the final renewal application, the OGC Attorney altered an email from the other agency so that the email stated t hat Page was " not a source" for the other agency, which the FBI affiant relied upon in signing t he final renewal application;
10. Omitted information from persons who previously had professional contacts with Steele or had direct knowledge of his work-related performance, including statements that Steele had no history of reporting in bad faith but "[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness, poor judgment," "pursued people with political risk but no intelligence value," "didn't always exercise great judgment," and it was " not clear what he would have done to validate" his reporting;
11. Omitted information obtained from Ohr about Steele and his election reporting, including that ( 1) Steele's reporting was going to Clinton's presidential campaign and others, (2) Simpson was paying Steele to discuss his reporting with the media, and (3) Steele was "desperate t hat Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. President"; Executive Summary Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation
12. Failed to update the description of Steele after information became known to the Crossfire Hurricane team, from Ohr and others, that provided greater clarity on t he political origins and connections of Steele's reporting, including that Simpson was hired by someone associated with the Democratic Party and/or the DNC;
13. Fail
ed to correct the assertion in the first FISA application that the FBI did not believe that Steele directly provided information to the reporter who wrote the September 23 Yahoo News article, even though there was no information in the Woods File to support this claim and even after certain Crossfire Hurricane officials learned in 2017, before the third renewal application, of an admission that Steele made in a court filing about his interactions with the news media in the late summer and early fall of 2016;
14. Omitted the finding from a FBI source validation report that Steele was suitable for continued operation but that his past contributions to the FBI's criminal program had been " minimally corroborated," and instead continued to assert in the source characterization statement that Steele's prior reporting had been "corroborated and used in criminal proceedings";
15. Omitted Papadopoulos's statements to an FBI CHS in late October 2016 denying that the Trump campaign was involved in t he circumstances of the DNC email hack;
16. Omitted Joseph Mifsud's denials to the FBI that he supplied Papadopoulos with the information Papadopoulos shared with the FFG (suggesting that the campaign received an offer or suggestion of assistance from Russia); and
17. Omitted information indicating that Page played no role in the Republican platform change on Russia's annexation of Ukraine as alleged in the Report 95, which was inconsistent with a factual assertion relied upon to support probable cause in all four FISA applications. Among the most serious of the 10 additional errors we found in the renewal applications was the FBI's failure to advise OJ or the court of the inconsistences, described in detail in Chapter Six, between Steele and his Primary Sub-source on the reporting relied upon in the FISA applications.
Although the Primary Sub-source's account of these communications, if true, was not consistent with and, in fact, contradicted the allegations of a "well-developed
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conspiracy" in Reports 95 and 102 attributed to Person 1 the FBI did not share this information with 01. The FBI also failed to share other inconsistencies with OJ, including the Primary Sub-source's account of the alleged meeting between Page and Sechin in Steele's Report 94 and his/her descriptions of the source network. The fact that the Primary Sub-source's account contradicted key assertions attributed to his/her own sub-sources in Steele's Reports 94, 95, and 102 should have generated significant discussions between the Crossfire Hurricane team and OJ prior to submitting the next FISA renewal application.
According to Evans, had OJ been made aware of the information, such discussions might have included the possibility of foregoing the renewal request altogether, at least until the FBI reconciled the differences between Steele's account and the Primary Sub-source's account to the satisfaction of 01. However, we found no evidence that the Crossfire Hurricane team ever considered whether any of the inconsistencies warranted reconsideration of the FBI's assessment of the reliability of the Steele reports or notice to OJ before the subsequent renewal applications were filed.
Instead, the second and third renewal applications provided no substantive information concerning the Primary Sub-source's interview, and offered only a brief conclusory statement that the FBI met with the Primary Sub-source "[i]n an effort to fu rther corroborate Steele's reporting" and found the Primary Sub-source to be "truthful and cooperative." We believe that including this statement, without also informing OJ and the court that the Primary Subsource's account of events contradicted key assertions in Steele's reporting, left a misimpression that the Primary Sub-source had corroborated the Steele reporting. Indeed, in a letter to the FISC in July 2018, before learning of t hese inconsistencies from us during this review, the Department defended the reliability of Steele's reporting and the FISA applications by citing, in part, to the Primary Sub-source's interview as "additional information corroborating [Steele's] reporting" and noting the FBI's determination that he/she was "truthful and cooperative."
The renewal applications also continued to fail to include information regarding Carter Page's past relationship with another U.S. government agency, even though both OJ and members of the Crossfire Hurricane expressed concern about the possibility of a prior relationship following interviews that Page gave to news outlets in April and May 2017 stating that he had assisted other U.S. government agencies in the past. As we describe in Chapter Eight, in June 2017, SSA 2, who was to be the affiant for Renewal Application No. 3 Executive Summary Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation and had been the affiant for the first t wo renewals, told us that he wanted a definitive answer to whether Page had ever been a source for another U.S. government agency before he signed the final renewal application.
This led to interactions between the OGC Attorney assigned to Crossfire Hurricane and a liaison from the other U.S. government agency. In an email from the liaison to the OGC Attorney, the liaison provided written guidance, including that it was the liaison's recollection that Page had or continued to have a relat1onsh1p with the other agency, and directed the OGC Attorney to review the information that the other agency had provided to the FBI in August 2016. As noted above, that August 2016 information stated that Page did, in fact have a prior relationship with that other agency. The' next morning, immediately following a 28 minute telephone call between the OGC Attorney and the OI Attorney, the OGC Attorney forwarded to th~ OI . Attorney the liaison's email (but not the original email from the OGC Attorney to the liaison setting out the questions he was asking).
The OI Attorney responded to the OGC Attorney, "thanks I think we are good and no need to carry it any further." However, when the OGC Attorney subsequently sent the liaison's email to SSA 2 the OGC Attorney altered the liaison's email by insert{ng the words "not a source" into it, thus making it appear that the liaison had said that Page was "not a source" for the other agency. Relying upon this altered email, SSA 2 signed the third renewal application that again failed to disclose Page's past relationship with the other agency.
Consistent with the Inspector General Act of 1978, following the OIG's discovery that the OGC Attorney had altered and sent the email to SSA 2, who therealter relied on it to swear out the third FISA application, the OIG promptly informe? the Attorney General and the FBI Director and provided them with the relevant information about the OGC Attorney's actions. None of the inaccuracies and omissions that we identified in the renewal applications were brought to the attention of OI before the applications were filed. As a result, similar to the first application, the Department officials who reviewed one or more of the renewal applications, including Yates, Boente, and Rosenstein, did not have accurate and complete information at the time they approved them.
We do not speculate whether or how having accurate and complete information might have influenced the decisions of senior Department leaders who supported the four FISA applications, or the court, if they had known all of the relevant information. Nevertheless,
it was the obligation of the FBI agents and supervisors who were aware of the information to
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ensure that the FISA applications were "scrupulously accurate" and that OI, the Department's decision makers, and ultimately, the court had the opportunity to consider the additional information and the information omitted from the first application. The individuals involved did not meet this obligation.
Conclusions Concerning All Four FISA Applications
We concluded that the failures described above and in this report represent serious performance failures by the supervisory and non-supervisory agents with responsibility over the FISA applications. These failures prevented OI from fully performing its gatekeeper function and deprived the decision makers the opportunity to make fully informed decisions. Although some of the factual misstatements and omissions we found in this review were arguably more significant than others, we believe that all of them taken together resulted in FISA applications that made it appear that the information supporting probable cause was stronger than was actually the case. We identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications, and many additional errors in the Woods Procedures.
These errors and omissions resulted from case agents providing wrong or incomplete information to OI and failing to flag important issues for discussion. While we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence of intentional misconduct on the part of the case agents who assisted OI in preparing the applications, or the agents and supervisors who performed the Woods Procedures, we also did not receive satisfactory explanations for the errors or problems we identified. In most instances, the agents and supervisors told us that they either did not know or recall why the information was not shared with OI, that the failure to do so may have been an oversight, that they did not recognize at the time the relevance of the information to the FISA application, or that they did not believe the missing information to be significant.
On this last point, we believe that case agents may have improperly substituted their own judgments in place of the judgment of OI, or in place of the court, to weigh the probative value of the information. Further, the failure to update OI on all significant case developments relevant to the FISA applications led us to conclude that the agents and supervisors did not give appropriate attention or treatment to the facts that cut against probable cause, or reassess the information supporting probable cause as the investigation progressed. The agents and SSAs also did not follow, or appear to even Executive Summary Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation know, the requirements in the Woods Procedures to reverify the factual assertions from previous applications that are repeated in renewal applications and verify source characterization statements with the CHS handling agent and document the verification in the Woods File.
That so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked teams on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations that was briefed to the highest levels within the FBI, and that FBI officials expected would eventually be subjected to close scrutiny, raised significant questions regarding the FBI chain of command's management and supervision of the FISA process. FBI Headquarters established a chain of command for Crossfire Hurricane that included close supervision by senior CD managers, who then briefed FBI leadership throughout the investigation. Although we do not expect managers and supervisors to know every fact about an investigation, or senior officials to know all the details of cases about which they are briefed, in a sensitive, high-priority matter like this one, it is reasonable to expect that they will take the necessary steps to ensure that they are sufficiently familiar with the facts and circumstances supporting and potentially undermining a FISA application in order to provide effective oversight, consistent with their level of supervisory responsibility.
We concluded that the information that was known to the managers, supervisors, and senior officials should have resulted in questions being raised regarding the reliability of the Steele reporting and the probable cause supporting the FISA applications, but did not. In our view, this was a failure of not only the operational team, but also of the managers and supervisors, including senior officials, in the chain of command. For these reasons, we recommend that the FBI review the performance of the employees who had responsibi lity for the preparation, Woods review, or approval of the FISA applications, as well as the managers and supervisors in the chain of command of the Carter Page investigation, including senior officials, and take any action deemed appropriate. In addition, given the extensive compliance failures we identified in this review, we believe that additional OIG oversight work is required to assess the FBI's compliance with Department and FBI FISA-related pol icies that seek to protect the civil liberties of U.S. persons.
Accordingly, we have today initiated an OIG audit that wil l further examine the FBI's compliance with the Woods Procedures in FISA applications that target U.S. persons in both counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations. This audit will be informed by the findings in this review, as well as by our prior work over
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the past 15 years on the Department's and FBI's use of national security and surveillance authorities, including authorities under FISA, as detailed in Chapter One. Issues Re lating to Department Attorney Bruce Ohr In Chapter Nine, we describe the interactions Department attorney Bruce Ohr had with Christopher Steele, the FBI, Glenn Simpson (the owner of Fusion GPS), and the State Department during the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
At the time of these interactions, which took place from about July 2016 to May 2017, Ohr was an Associate Deputy Attorney General in the Office of t he Deputy Attorney General (ODAG) and the Director of the Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF). Ohr's Interactions with Steele, the FBI, Simpson, and the State Department Beginning in July 2016, at about t he same time that Steele was engaging with the FBI on his election reporting, Steele contacted Ohr, who he had known since at least 2007, to discuss information from Steele's election reports.
At Steele's suggestion, Ohr also met in August 2016 with Simpson to discuss Steele's reports. At the time, Ohr's wife, Nellie Ohr, worked at Fusion GPS as an independent contractor. Ohr also met with Simpson in December 2016, at which time Simpson gave Ohr a thumb drive containing numerous Steele election reports that Ohr thereafter provided to the FBI. On October 18, 2016, after speaking with Steele that morning, Ohr met with McCabe to share Steele's and Simpson's information with him.
Thereafter, Ohr met with members of the Crossfire Hurricane team 13 times between November 21, 2016, and May 15, 2017, concerning his contacts with Steele and Simpson. All 13 meetings occurred after the FBI had closed Steele as a CHS and, except for the November 21 meeting, each meeting was initiated at Ohr's request. Ohr told us that he did not recall the FBI asking him to take any action regarding Steele or Simpson, but Ohr also stated that "the general instruction was to let [the FBI] know ... when I got information from Steele." The Crossfire Hurricane team memorialized each of the meetings with Ohr as an "interview" using an FBI FD302 form.
Separately, in November 2016, Ohr met with senior State Department officials regarding Steele's election reporting. Executive Summary Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation Department leadership, including Ohr's supervisors in ODAG and the ODAG officials who reviewed and approved the Carter Page FISA applications, were unaware of Ohr's meetings with FBI officials, Steele, Simpson, and the State Department until after Congress requested information from the Department regarding Ohr's activities in late November 2017. We did not identify a specific Department policy prohibiting Ohr from meeting with Steele, Simpson, or the State Department and providing the information he learned from those meetings to the FBI.
However, Ohr was clearly cognizant of his responsibility to inform his supervisors of these interactions, and acknowledged to the OIG that the possibility that he would have been told by his supervisors to stop having such contact may have factored into his decision not to tell them about it. We concluded that Ohr committed consequential errors in judgment by ( 1) failing to advise his direct supervisors or the DAG that he was communicating with Steele and Simpson and then requesting meetings with the FBI's Deputy Director and Crossfire Hurricane team on matters that were outside of his areas of responsibility, and (2) making himself a witness in the investigation by meeting with Steele and providing Steele's information to the FBI.
As we describe in Chapter Eight, the late discovery of Ohr's meetings with the FBI prompted NSD to notify the FISC in July 2018, over a year after the final FISA renewal order was issued, of information that Ohr had provided to the FBI but that the FBI had failed to inform NSD and 01 about (and therefore was not included in the FISA applications), including that Steele was " desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. President." FBI Compliance with Policies The FBI's CHS Policy Guide (CHSPG) provides guidance to agents concerning contacts with CHSs after they have been closed for cause, as was the case with Steele as of November 2016. According to the CHSPG, a handling agent must not initiate contact with or respond to contacts from a former CHS who has been closed for cause absent exceptional circumstances that are approved by an SSA.
The CHSPG also requires reopening of the CHS if the relationship between the FBI and a closed CHS is expected to continue beyond the initial contact or debriefing. Reopening requires high levels of supervisory approval, including a finding that the benefits of reopening the CHS outweigh the risks.
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We found that, while the Crossfire Hurricane team did not initiate direct contact with Steele after his closure, it responded to numerous contacts made by Steele through Ohr. Ohr himself was not a direct witness in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation; rather, his purpose in communicating with the FBI was to pass along information from Steele. While the FBI's CHS policy does not explicitly address indirect contact between an FBI agent and a closed CHS, we concluded that the repeated contacts with Steele should have triggered the CHS policy requiring that such contacts occur only after an SSA determines that exceptional circumstances exist.
While an SSA was present for the meetings with Ohr, we found no evidence that the SSAs made considered judgments that exceptional circumstances existed for the repeated contacts. We also found that, given that there were 13 different meetings with Ohr over a period of months, the use of Ohr as a conduit between the FBI and Steele created a relationship by proxy that should have triggered, pursuant to FBI policy, a supervisory decision about
Ethics Issues Raised by Nellie Ohr's Former Employment with Fusion GPS Fusion GPS employed Nellie Ohr as an independent contractor from October 2015 to September 2016. On his annual financial disclosure forms covering calendar years 2015 and 2016, Ohr listed Nellie Ohr as an "independent contractor" and reported her income from that work on the form. We determined that financial disclosure ru les, 5 C.F.R. Part 2634, did not require Ohr to list on the form the specific organizations, such as Fusion GPS, that paid Nellie Ohr as an independent contractor during the reporting period. In addition, for reasons we explain in Chapter Eleven, we concluded that the federal ethics rules did not require Ohr to obtain Department ethics counsel approval before engaging with the FBI in connection with the Crossfire Hurricane matter because of Nellie Ohr's prior work for Fusion GPS.
However, we found that, given the factual circumstances that existed, and the appearance that they created,
Ohr displayed a lapse in judgment by not availing himself of the process described in the ethics rules to consult with the Department ethics official about his involvement in the investigation. Meetings Involving Ohr, CRM officials, and the FBI Regarding the MLARS Investigation Executive Summary Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation Ohr's supervisors in ODAG also were unaware that Ohr, shortly after the U.S. elections in November 2016, and again in early 2017, participated in discussions about a money laundering investigation of Manafort that was then being led by prosecutors from the Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS), which is located in the Criminal Division (CRM) at t he Department's headquarters.
As described in more detail in Chapter Nine, in November 2016, Ohr told CRM Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz and Counsel to the CRM Assistant Attorney General Zainab Ahmad about information he was getting from Steele and Simpson about Manafort. Between November 16, 2016 and December 15, 2016, Ohr participated in several meetings that were attended, at various times, by some or all of the following individuals: Swartz, Ahmad,
Andrew Weissmann (then Section Chief of CRM's Fraud Section) [who went on to become a top prosecutor for Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe of allegations of Russia collusion], Strzok, and Lisa Page.
The meetings involving Ohr, Swartz, Ahmad, and Weissmann focused on their shared concern that MLARS was not moving quickly enough on the Manafort criminal investigation and whether there were steps they could take to move the investigation forward. The meetings with Strzok and Page focused primarily on whether the FBI could assess the case's relevance, if any, to the FBI 's Russian interference investigation. MLARS was not represented at any of these meetings or told about them, and none of attendees had supervisory responsibility over the MLARS investigation. There were no meetings about the Manafort case involving Ohr, Swartz, Ahmad, and Weissmann from December 16, 20 16 to January 30, 2017.
On January 31, 2017, one day after Yates was removed as DAG, Ahmad, by t hen an Acting CRM Deputy Assistant Attorney General, after consulting with Swartz and Weissmann, sent an email to Lisa Page, copying Weissmann, Swartz, and Ohr, requesting a meeting the next day to discuss "a few Criminal Division related developments." The next day, February 1, Swartz, Ohr, Ahmad, and Weissmann met with Strzok, Lisa Page, and an FBI Acting Section Chief. None of the attendees at the meeting could explain to us what the "Criminal Division related developments" were, and we did not find any. Meeting notes reflect, among other things, that the group discussed the Manafort criminal investigation and efforts that the Department could undertake to investigate attempts by Russia to influence the 2016 elections. MLARS was not represented at, or told about, the meeting. We are not aware of information indicating that any of the discussions involving Ohr, Swartz,
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Weissmann, Ahmad, Strzok, and Lisa Page resulted in any actions taken or not taken in the MLARS investigation, and ultimately the investigation remained with MLARS until it was transferred to the Office of the Special Counsel in May 2017. We also did not identify any Department policies prohibiting internal discussions about a pending investigation among officials not assigned to the matter, or between those officials and senior officials from the FBI. However, as described in Chapter Nine, we were told that there was a decision not to inform the leadership of CRM, both before and after the change in presidential administrations, of these discussions in order to insulate the MLARS investigation from becoming "politicized."
We concluded that this decision, made in the absence of concerns of potential wrongdoing or misconduct, and for the purpose of avoiding the appearance that an investigation is "politicized," fundamental ly misconstrued who is ultimately responsible and accountable for the Department's work. We agree with the concerns expressed to us by then DAG Yates and then CRM Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell. Department leaders cannot fulfill their management responsibilities, and be held accountable for the Department's actions, if subordinates intentionally withhold information from them in such circumstances.
The Use of Confidential Sources (Other Than Steele) and Undercover Employees As discussed in Chapter Ten, we determined that, during the 20 16 presidential campaign, the Crossfire Hurricane team tasked several CHSs, which resu lted in multiple interactions with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, both during and after the time they were affiliated with t he Trump campaign, and one with a high-level Trump campaign official who was not a subject of the investigation.
All of these CHS interactions were consensually monitored and recorded by the FBI. As noted above, under Department and FBI policy, the use of a CHS to conduct consensual monitoring is a matter of investigative judgment that, absent certain circumstances, can be authorized by a first-line supervisor (a supervisory special agent). We determined that the CHS operations conducted during Crossfire Hurricane received the necessary FBI approvals, and that AD Priestap knew about, and approved of, all of the Crossfire Hurricane CHS operations, even in circumstances where a first-level supervisory special agent could have approved the operations.
We found no evidence that the FBI used CHSs or UCEs to interact with members of the Trump campaign prior to the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. After the opening of the investigation, we Executive Summary Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation found no evidence that the FBI placed any CHSs or UCEs within the Trump campaign or tasked any CHSs or UCEs to report on the Trump campaign.
