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No Law Is Above Repug Politics
"Dr. Mengele stands, determining whether new arrivals are fit to work or whether they are to be killed immediately. Taking the prisoner’s advice, Eliezer lies about his age, telling Mengele he is eighteen. He also says that he is a farmer rather than a student, and is motioned to Mengele’s left, along with his father."
No Law Is Above Repug Politics
New Red Flags Emerging From FBI's Handling of Michael Flynn's Case
The Justice Department’s closing of its criminal case against President Trump's former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on Thursday came as new red flags emerged from recently released do ents revealing the FBI’s handling of the matter.
Former FBI agents and federal prosecutors tell RealClearInvestigations that the do ents show su iously irregular handling and editing of Flynn’s FD-302 form, the official do ent used to record what happens in FBI interviews. That form served as a key record used to charge Flynn with lying to federal agents. He pleaded guilty to that charge in December 2017 but had been trying to withdraw the plea, arguing, as his lawyer put it, that he was “deliberately set up and framed by corrupt agents at the top of the FBI.”
Since the do ents were released last week, much attention has focused on a handwritten note by FBI counterintelligence head Bill Priestap in advance of the January 2017 interview with Flynn that would result in the retired lieutenant general being charged with lying to federal agents: “What is our goal?” Priestap asked, “Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”
The new irregularities concern what happened after Flynn was interviewed by FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka on January 24, 2017 – the interview in which Flynn was alleged to have lied about a December phone call with the Russian ambassador. FBI procedure is that one agent asks questions while another takes notes. Here, lead agent Strzok was the questioner and Pientka was responsible for memorializing the interview. After completing an interview, those notes are required to be organized and written up on an FD-302 form, which then becomes an official do ent used as evidence in an investigation.
FBI policy requires 302 forms to be submitted within five working days of an interview. The FBI took three weeks to deliberate on and compose Flynn’s 302 form, and it was mislabeled a “DRAFT DO ENT,” requiring a resubmission of the form three months later. A prosecutor working in the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which eventually charged Flynn, was required to submit a separate do ent to a federal judge to explain that irregularity.
The new Flynn do ents shed light on what happened during the unusual three weeks composing the 302. They include texts between Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who were communicating extensively during an extramarital affair in which they revealed an anti-Trump bias resulting in their later dismissal from Mueller’s investigation.
In one text, dated February 10, Strzok tells Page he is heavily editing Pientka’s 302 form to the point he’s “trying not to completely re-write” it. Other messages reveal that Page, who did not attend the interview, reviewed the 302 form and made editing suggestions. On February 14, Page texts Strzok, "Is Andy good with the 302?" – presumably referring to FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. The next day, February 15, the Flynn 302 was officially submitted and filed with the FBI.
FBI supervisors, however, are not supposed to rewrite other agents’ 302 forms. Nor are 302 forms supposed to be edited by FBI personnel who were not present at the interview, and both of these things happened in the Flynn case. “I've probably written in the close to the low thousands of 302s. I've probably supervised or overseen thousands upon thousands of more of those,” James Gagliano, retired 25-year veteran of the FBI and current CNN analyst, told RealClearInvestigations. “This is not how we do business as an FBI supervisor. I never, ever materially altered a 302.”
Former Special Agent Thomas J. Baker agreed: ”We never changed an agent's 302. An agent would fight a supervisor who wanted him to change the 302, because it's what that agent observed and heard and in his interview. So for us to read, what’s do ented in this new material, that coming back from that interview with Flynn, which is a key event, that Peter Strzok said he virtually rewrote the whole thing – it damned them with their own words.”
Both former agents also expressed concern that Page, who was not present at the interview, was editing the 302 form against FBI protocol. “For [Strzok] to send that 302 to Lisa Page, a non-badge wearing, non-credential-having FBI agent, is unconscionable,” says Gagliano.
Baker said it was “not normal and su ious” that it took three weeks for Pientka’s 302 form chronicling the Flynn interview to be filed. Gagliano also found the time delay concerning. “If the interview is on Monday, you better have that 302 uploaded on Friday. That's a requirement. Now if you go outside of that, does that mean that there's some skullduggery afoot? No, but you're going to explain that in court,” Gagliano said. “A defense attorney worth his or her salt will make hay with that. ‘Hey agent Gagliano, you know what the requirement is in the Bureau, right? Why was this thing typed up seven days after the interview?’ And then you sit there hemming and hawing and a dead-to-rights case gets blown open because you didn't follow a protocol.”
Even after the Flynn 302 was collectively written during the weeks-long delay in submission, the original wasn’t initially used in the case. Instead, Baker said, Mueller’s team submitted their own interview with Strzok “about his recollection of the interview with Flynn five or six months ago. Now that’s just bizarre.”
Eventually, the 302 was filed to the court in two versions, requiring a convoluted explanation about what had happened. In a cover letter to District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan dated December 17, 2018, Brandon Van Grack, a prosecutor on the Mueller probe, explained:
Pursuant to the Court’s Minute Order dated today, the government hereby files two redacted versions of the FD-302 report summarizing the FBI’s interview of the defendant on January 24, 2017. See Attachment. The content of both versions of the report is identical, except that the first version, which was digitally signed and certified in February 2017, inadvertently contained a header labeled “DRAFT DO ENT/DELIBERATIVE MATERIAL.” Once that error was recognized, the header was removed and a corrected version, omitting only the header, was re- signed and re-certified in May 2017.
Sol Wisenberg, a former federal prosecutor who served as deputy independent counsel during the Whitewater and Lewinsky investigation, says that Van Grack’s letter is “very embarrassing as a prosecutor. Forget about the five day rule, if it's three weeks or a month, it's just like, ‘What took you so long?’”
On Thursday, shortly before news broke that the Justice Department was dropping the Flynn prosecution, Van Grack submitted a request to withdraw from the team of federal prosecutors on the Flynn case. Van Grack’s withdrawal request also came amid allegations he had withheld exculpatory information from Flynn’s attorneys that was contained in the do ent dump the previous week.
Hovering over all these questions about what happened with Flynn’s 302 is the silence of Joe Pientka, the other agent who was present for the Flynn interview. The FBI rebuffed congressional requests to make him available for questions. The Bureau argued that because Pientka was assigned to the Mueller probe, interviewing him would interfere with the special counsel’s investigation.
However, the Muller probe concluded last year, and the new revelations are shining a spotlight on Pientka’s absence. On May 4, Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mike Johnson of Louisiana sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray demanding, among other things, that he make Pientka available for a transcribed interview regarding Flynn.
And other key lawmakers are determined to hold the FBI accountable for what happened in the Flynn case. “The FBI set up General Flynn -- that is clear as day,” Rep. Devin Nunes, ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, tells RealClearInvestigations. “There is FBI leadership ordering the case kept open when agents wanted to close it for lack of evidence, the discussion of getting Flynn to lie or trying to get him fired, the ambush interview, the withholding of exculpatory evidence, and many other acts of blatant malfeasance. None of this is standard procedure. It’s a naked abuse of authority.”
https://www.realclearinvestigations....se_123520.html
A Catastrophe for the DOJ
Your brief write-up is true as far as it goes,
but doesn’t even scratch the surface of what a long-term catastrophe this will be for the Justice Department.
I’ve been around federal law enforcement for virtually all of my career —
as a federal prosecutor,
defense lawyer,
official at top levels of Main Justice, and judge —
and I don’t think the Department has ever suffered a greater self-inflicted wound.
Good lawyers and law enforcement agents give up lucrative careers to serve the Department,
and then work tremendously hard, usually in complete obscurity, because
they want to feel like they’re doing the right thing.
Now they know that their work and their professional reputations are expendable in Barr’s DOJ.
The public in general, and jurors in particular, will lose faith that DOJ follows the law —
making it harder to get convictions even in non-political cases.
For many judges, this will undermine their willingness to assume DOJ’s good faith and honesty for as long as Barr is in charge,
and likely even longer (their handling of the pandemic’s effect on prisoners ain’t helping in that department, either).
Prosecutors and agents rely on that presumption not only to win marginal cases but also to make their jobs easier so that they can bring more cases than would be possible if they had to satisfy more skeptical judges.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of DOJ’s good reputation to the success of its mission.
Both in terms of attracting and keeping good lawyers and agents, and
in terms of bringing and winning cases,
today’s debacle will haunt DOJ for years.
Michael Flynn won’t nearly be the last criminal to benefit from that.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-catastrophe-for-the-doj
You stupid s slurped it up
“Why don’t we go back to that sentence that I just asked you about. It says ‘the Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their staff dealing with Russians,” Gowdy said. “Well, how would you know what the U.S. government knew at that point? You didn’t work for it, did you?”
“I didn’t,” said Farkas, a former mid-level Russia analyst who left the federal government in 2015.
“Then how did you know?” Gowdy responded.
“I didn’t know anything,” Farkas said.
“Did you have information connecting the Trump campaign to the hack of the DNC?” Gowdy asked.
“No,” Farkas admitted.
“So when you say, ‘We knew,’ the reality is you knew nothing,” Gowdy asked later during the deposition.
“Correct,” Farkas responded.
Gowdy didn’t stop there.
“So when you say ‘knew,’ what you really meant was felt?” he asked.
“Correct,” Farkas answered.
“You didn’t know anything?” Gowdy continued.
“That’s correct,” Farkas responded.
If this blows up in their ing faces too omg
Funny how all the cherry-pickers are on the same side that already ed the football and claimed victory.
WTF are they defending now?
If anyone has time they can cherry-pick bannons, kuckner or trump jrs transcripts and then clutch their pearlz and claim it is the smoking gun
but truth is truth and anyone can read these GOP majority in control- at the time transcripts and see with their own eyes how the GOP softballed the trump team witnesses and clutched their pearls and attacked any non trump team witness
from the jump!
Bill Barr Tests Negative for Integrity
Barr said that he was putting into place new protocols that would
require Justice Department employees to be tested for integrity before entering the building.
“I thought that anyone with integrity had already left the Justice Department, but apparently I was mistaken,” he said.
“It’s better to be safe than sorry.”
Although he was elated to learn that he had tested negative for integrity,
Barr said that he shuddered to think how close he came to contracting the dreaded virtue.
“Having integrity would have made it impossible for me to work for President Trump,” he said.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/bill-barr-tests-negative-for-integrity
William Barr Reads “Moby- ,” Finds No Evidence of Whales
WASHINGTON —Attorney General William Barr has just read the classic American novel “Moby- ,” by Herman Melville, and
found that the book contains “no evidence whatsoever of whales,” Barr stated on Tuesday.
The Attorney General issued his statement on the absence of whales in the Melville classic in a
two-paragraph book report released to the news media.
“Those who read ‘Moby- ’ looking for whales will be sorely disappointed,” Barr wrote.
“There are no whales here.”
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/william-barr-reads-moby- -finds-no-evidence-of-whales?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY _Borowitz_050820&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bd6795524c17c1048022fcc &cndid=43758549&hasha=992d608214b505003aa04bf10a59 5031&hashb=542eb31d958e85ddd5a4c3ccf3faae18526a77b d&hashc=54b3612ab970ce13a64a16665b1987080ca5b72e2e e762b722fbba6ab378f2f5&esrc=bounceX&utm_term=TNY_B orowitz
Asked whether he was doing Trump’s bidding, Barr said: “I’m doing the law’s bidding.”
The proclamation rang hollow to numerous Justice Department employees.
“There seems to be a different set of rules for political appointees,” said one longtime DOJ official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I was surprised. I didn’t think it would end like this — and this quickly.”
The official said Barr’s move was another signal to career officials that their work could be readily upended for political reasons. “It’s more demoralizing than anything else,” the DOJ official said.
One Justice Department lawyer added: “It's deeply disheartening to see politics infect Justice. It's everywhere now under Barr."
While officials predicted more departures at DOJ, the overt signs of protest from within the department Thursday were relatively mild.
While the longtime prosecutor on the Flynn case, Brandon L. Van Grack, withdrew shortly before the government moved to dismiss the case, department officials said Van Grack would remain in his post overseeing foreign-agent cases.
The other line prosecutor handling the Flynn case in recent months, Jocelyn Ballantine, appeared to have declined to sign the 20-page pleading explaining why DOJ was seeking to drop the prosecution.
Some lamented that there was not already a more dramatic response to Barr’s actions.
“This moment represents the full collapse of an apolitical Justice Department. An astonishing assault on the rule of law and in a functional DOJ it would prompt mass resignation,” former intelligence community lawyer Susan Hennessey wrote on Twitter.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...mueller-244043
pure cowardice
there should be mass resignations
there should be mass leaks of the full mueller report, leaks of the 13 cases mueller referred to other fbi units
but
just cowards in the DOJ now.
I rather they stay and work from within, tbh... in this shady times, if they resign, they'll probably be replaced with partisan hacks, so it's better they keep their post.
So you agree with me then.
It’s hilarious watching you still go to bat for the bad actions of the former FBI/DOJ agents. Even more hilarious Politico tossed in a quote from Lawfare’s Susan Hennessy.
He should never have even been considered for the NSA job. Why would you want one who lies to the Vice President, the chief of Staff and the Press Secretary?
I'm only going to bat for an independent, non politicized DOJ.
It's all fun and games until the AG is a democrat and does the same politicization and abuses (which I will condemn just as strongly, but you will only then join me). The worst part is that now they'll have justification to do so. I had the same opinion when Fast n Furious happened, BTW.
I don't care about feelings or politics... This was a case where the criminal confessed to the crime, twice, there's not many more straightforward cases like this in our judicial system.
What the DOJ did with this decision is universally considered extremely exceptional. We already had other prosecutors leaving after the same sort of treatment on the Roger Stone case.
It's unfortunate for all Americans when this happens.
It would be easier to believe you if you hadn't sat silent while the FBI/DOJ ran roughshed over Trump and his campaign.
And yet you're still mum on what Jensen uncovered Van Grack doing
The Wittes, Hennesseys, and Rangappas of the world are furiously putting out pieces against Barr while ignoring what US Attorney Jensen uncovered.
but he resigned in protest
Again, how does this change Flynn's lying to everyone?
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