Advisory Opinions - All About The IG

Episode Date: December 10, 2019

David French and Sarah Isgur launch their new podcast from The Dispatch with a detailed discussion of the Inspector General's report of FISA abuse in the 2016 election -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Get started for $1 down and then only $15 a month. Offer ends April 12th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Hi, this is David French with Sarah Isger, and you are listening to the very first, very special episode of our new Advisory Opinions podcast. We are both with Dispatch Media. And what is this? What is this podcast? This podcast is going to be a look at law and culture from two people who have been neck deep in battles over law and culture for years now. Sarah, my co-host, is a Harvard Law grad, extremely experienced in the political wars, just removed from working in the Department of Justice as the spokesperson for the Department of Justice.

One of the sharpest political commentators out there. And I'm also learning a possessor of terrible pop culture opinions. You are. Yes, you are. I heard the remnant podcast when you were you and Jonah were dragging me. So we're going to talk about, as I said, law and culture a ton. Politics will sneak in there as well. But we're going to come at you at least weekly. But I said this is a very special episode. It's a very special episode because this is the day that the office of the inspector general of the DOJ dropped his report on the election investigation of Donald Trump, the initiation of the investigation of the Trump campaign, allegations of FISA abuse and the FISA warrants obtained against Carter Page. And it's such a treat to have Sarah here on day one with episode one talking about this topic, because although, Sarah, you are not involved in this and

part of the campaign, you're working with Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein during the bulk of the entire Mueller investigation and before the Mueller investigation. Yeah, I joined actually my first full day on the job was the day that Attorney General Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation. So that was my first full day. And then I stayed in my role as spokesperson until his, he left as Attorney General. We'll gloss over that day too. That was two days before my birthday. So that was memorable as well. Yeah. And then I left the department just shortly before the Mueller investigation was, the report was put out publicly. Right, right. And you are, so you were working with Rod Rosenstein as he was running the Russia investigation.

As Sessions recused, Rod Rosenstein was the boss of the Russia investigation at that point. In a lot of ways, we had two attorneys general, you know, Jeff Sessions was the attorney general over, you know, the myriad investigations, criminal otherwise that we had going on at the Department of Justice, opioids, immigration, cartels, so much going on. And then Rod Rosenstein was the acting attorney general for the Russia investigation. So there are many memories I have of literally one of them's on the fifth floor, one of them's on the fourth floor, and they're right above each other. And there's a staircase and just me clomping around in my little heels,

like in between the two, running between the two offices so it was an experience and now we have this IG report that in some ways for me much like the Muller report actually there's only so much you can know while things are moving at the time and so to have someone fill in a lot of gaps for you, provide their own conclusions. And I think it's worth noting the IG interviewed 170 people for this. I am not one of them. If there is derogatory information about you included in an IG report, you do get the chance to read it in advance and comment to the IG. I did not read this in advance, so I am not mentioned in this. I am not party to it, et cetera. Yeah. So that, well, that's the great news. You did not have any derogatory information. It's something that I think every government employee,

it's an important part of being in a government employee is not getting contacted by the IG. Well, you know, I had 10 years in the Army Reserve, a couple of those years active and had lots of contact with various inspectors general as in my capacity as a military lawyer, but thankfully never being interviewed by the IG, which is like the last thing that anybody really wants to experience. So you've read this. I've read this. This thing is 470 pages. I'll confess parts I skimmed. It's a lot like law school. I didn't read the whole book, but I'm here for the exam. Exactly. And we're going to kind of go through this step by step. But before we do that,

what was your overall impression of this thing? I had said publicly and boy, it's even more true than I thought it would be that we would live in two alternate realities on Twitter and cable news. Each side was going to declare a victory and you would almost not know that there were other parts of the ig report depending on which quote unquote team you're on and just as i sort of review my own twitter feed of what people are saying you can tune into one whole channel that says no political bias found fbi did everything right and you can tune into a whole nother channel that says rampant FISA abuse, just like we said, this is egregious. And the truth is the IG report says both. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I came away with it feeling very similar to the way I felt after reading the Mueller report, which was, okay, there was this big conspiracies theory that said that Trump was in active cooperation with the Russians and that essentially, you know, you have these alleged meetings

in Prague from the Steele dossier. You have all of this stuff that was being dissected in dark corners of Twitter at length of Trump being an active Russian agent. And then that wasn't what Mueller found. It wasn't what he found at all. But there was a bunch of stuff there that was bad. And so you had people running around saying that the Mueller report had completely vindicated Trump, which was not true, or the Trump campaign, which was not true at all. And then people saying that the Mueller report had vindicated a lot of everyone's fears about Trump, which was not true.

And with this one, I feel like you've got a situation where the there at least isn't in this report. We can talk about what Durham and Barr are talking about, but at least in this report, there is a foundation for the big conspiracy theory, which was that there was that this was a politically motivated witch hunt from the beginning. But I don't think anybody can read this thing and say this is great for the FBI. I mean, there's a lot of stuff in there. I don't have an idealistic view of big government investigations. I don't view the FBI.

I've been around enough major investigations in my life that I know that often you'll have side shoots and other parts of it that are have real problems. So I'm not idealistic when I read this stuff. But even me in my cynical mind, there was stuff that troubled me. There's two big problems for the FBI in this one. And I'm not sure that the reporting for the last year or two has been clear on just how senior the folks are that we've been talking about. We throw away Nate, throw around names, struck page, uh, or et cetera. These were not line people within the department, within the FBI. They're, they're incredibly, they're holding very senior positions. I think that is a problem for the FBI that people can get to that level, making that decision with not a lot of oversight because there's no one really above them.

Now, the good news on that front for Chris Ray and the team that's now in place, it's a whole different team. None of the people mentioned in the report they've all been fired or resigned um of that senior group that was really at the fbi the other problem though that is a much it's a cultural problem and i don't know that the ig's recommendations though well intentioned i think on this there's not like a silver bullet, which is the cabal of people that are mentioned throughout this report made a decision. And I'm not even sure that they sat around and said this is the decision so much as it was the culture at the FBI. And I think in other places where they decided not to inform people at the Department of Justice, political appointees, even at points not informing Jim Comey, it looks like,

because there's this idea that career staff are insulated from these negative considerations. Instead of, you know, Sally Yates, I thought, had one of the best lines that the IG quotes. We are held politically accountable for the decisions that are made at the Department of Justice, we are held politically accountable for the decisions that are made at the Department of Justice, but we are not being told what is happening intentionally at times throughout what you see in this report. That, I think, is the lasting problem for Bill Barr, for Chris Wray. And if they have one legacy, I think that changing that culture at the FBI and the Department of Justice and some of that mistrust that the one side thinks the other side is politicized and that the political side thinks the other side isn't telling them things. That's a legacy that doesn't fit neatly into either

political box, actually. So we're not going to hear a lot about it on Twitter or cable news. But to me, the biggest thing coming out of this report is how ingrained that was. the biggest thing coming out of this report is how ingrained that was. Yeah, yeah, that was very plain. I mean, and especially when we get into the FISA elements of this, that's where you're really going to see that dynamic coming forward in spades. Bruce Orr not telling the deputy attorney general through three deputy attorneys general. So it wasn't political.

He didn't tell Sally Yates, but he also didn't tell Rosenside and he didn't tell Dana Bente in between. Yeah. And, you know, we were slacking back and forth before the podcast and you raised a point that I think is really good here. And that is one takeaway from this thing is thank God the special counsel got involved and sort of removed this from this, this, um, you know, from this small group that had been running with this ball for months, and as you said, many times without informing the political appointees about what they were doing. So it felt like you look at this, and it seems as if once the special counsel got involved, there was a degree of adult supervision here, and it got to be a much more rational process. Well, that's what's so funny, again, when you get to the political talking points that each side has.

they're currently on this podcast, tried to make this point at the time was that by appointing a special counsel, you entirely change the chain of command, removing Andy McCabe from the chain of command, uh, struck and page are removed shortly thereafter. The OGC attorney who's mentioned as altering emails is removed shortly thereafter. A special counsel provides a totally different level of oversight, chain of command. But to my point about that cultural thing, you also then have a fully integrated team between the department lawyers

and the FBI agents physically as well. Like they're all located, co-located. And it changes that culture in a way that clearly you can see from the IG report was a really important part of getting this investigation on track, finished and put out and put to bed. vindicated that. I mean, we have a picture of Russian involvement and the actions of the Trump team that nobody has seriously questioned that narrative in any material respect at all, which is an achievement all by itself. And then when you combine it with this IG report of painting a pretty darn compelling picture of the disarray and dysfunction before then. Um, it seems like your boss made a good decision

back in early 2017 and maybe one day history will more fully vindicate him for that. But well, the other part to weirdly disagree with you about like, thanks for agreeing with me. Now I'm going to disagree with you. Yeah, of course. This is the another part that I want to make sure we discuss is how weird it is. They opened this in July 2016 based on information from a friendly foreign government on Carter Page. And nothing that they learn in the next six months does anything but undermine their case, but they keep pushing it and they keep using every single tool. And as the IG describes it, more intrusive tools, despite getting everything they're getting back saying there's, you know,

nope, that turns out not to be right. That's not corroborated. And so you do get this sense that that team, that core FBI team was going to push this. They were convinced it was true and there was nothing they were going to learn that could convince them it wasn't. Yeah, that you do get that impression. Uh, so let's go back at the very beginning. The very first part of it is the, is the inspector general detailing how this crossfire hurricane investigation was launched. And he does a pretty good job and a pretty thorough job of explaining it. He doesn't really break any new news. I guess some of the for those who lament fake news, I guess what he does is he vindicates a lot of New York Times reporting,

which indicated that this was initiated after a friendly foreign government related a conversation that George Papadopoulos had with him over over alleged. And what's interesting about this inspector general report is really sort of how vague the conversation was. A very vague conversation about some sort of offer or some sort of communication with Russians about information for the Trump campaign. The quote is actually George Papadopoulos, quote, suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs. Clinton and President Obama. You will note a lot of the words suggested, suggested some kind. It could assist this process, like very vague.

Yeah, super vague. And I think the if that's all you had, if that's the only thing that was available, I would think why on earth are you opening investigation? But the inspector general takes great pains to say this is happening against the backdrop of well-known, very troubling, actual Russian interference. Sure, the DNC hack. Exactly. Attempted hacks of voting machines, for example, which thankfully didn't actually occur. machines, for example, which thankfully didn't actually occur. So there's actual troubling information. And then you have this vague suggestion that double use of the term suggests that somehow Russia is trying to reach out to Trump or the Trump team. And then they launch an investigation and they eventually end up dealing with or drilling down on four people.

Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn. I also think it's worth noting they discuss and very much decide not to brief the Trump campaign or then candidate Trump on what they have found. Right. Right. And that was, I think, a very important point. So it's quite and they tried it. They justified it by saying, well, you would never brief someone if you thought there was a chance that they would be involved. We only brief them if that's if we know that they're victims, like the DNC was a victim of the hack. But it's quite clear from the beginning, there are strong suspicions. And they begin with, you know, what sounds like to me, except for some,

they begin with a combination of human source investigation and what looks like a bunch of internet searches. We all do that. That's where my medical degree comes from is Google. Exactly. Dr. Google has helped me many times. But the, so it looks like they, and in fact, that's how they identify Manafort. And that's how they identify Flynn. It's a lot of open source information about their connections with Russia. And there's apparently an ongoing

counterintelligence matter open with Carter Page. And so they kind of fix on their four, but they don't do anything at first really all that intrusive. Other than sort of this mysterious, you know, that they go and interview. Is it Alexander Downer, the source of the FFG report? They interview some other people. It doesn't seem all that, let's put it this way. It's not that much cloak and dagger stuff yet. Important though, at this point, they have still not informed anyone

at the Department of Justice, aside from a line attorney in the National Security Division. No leadership knows. Comey says he does not know. McCabe says he does. And you sort of get just the he said, he said in the report, which is kind of fun. Yes.

You know, which is one of the things about the report is, OK, they did all this. It doesn't seem right. And yet it also doesn't seem to violate any department policies. They also don't have the Steele dossier yet. Steele has not come into play yet. Exactly. So Steele, there are elements of Steele that some people at the FBI have, but the Crossfire Hurricane team does not have. And this is important because there are a lot of people sort of in the larger sort of Twitter megaverse that believe that it's steel was the inception of this whole thing. The steel dossier was the exception of this whole thing.

And that seems to not be the case, at least based on this evidence. It becomes important soon enough. Oh yes. This very early stage. Uh, the, the IG feels like he has it down the timeline that while some people could have known, it had never gotten transferred over to the Crossfire Hurricane team or to senior leadership within the FBI. And the one part that was news to me, so they do this sort of less intrusive investigation, doesn't really turn up much of anything.

They try to go more intrusive with Carter Page, but they don't have enough for that. They don't have enough for the FISA on Carter Page until then, drum roll, please, here comes the infernal Steele dossier. And that's the tipping point for the FISA. Right. They get turned down by the attorneys at the Department of Justice the first time. Minus Steele dossier, which is really relevant, right? When they have just pre-Steele dossier, the attorneys say not enough and send them back. Steele dossier comes into play and we can get into the details of how it comes into play, but they come back. The IG says what that day, or maybe it was the next day.

Right. Right. It was within a day or two. Yes. Yeah. And they're right back with the attorneys and they're like, now we got it. And the attorneys agree at that point. And we also find out there's a lot they don't tell the attorneys. Yes. Yeah. Now this this part, this part is where if I'm some if I'm one of these, if you know, if I had been expressing concern for the last two years on Twitter about FISA, this is the part where I'm I am running the flag up the flagpole of vindication. The big vindication flag is flying right at this point. Yeah, the part that I don't know, the part that upset me the most is that there is an attorney mentioned by name. The part that upset me the most is that there's an attorney mentioned by name. His name is Stuart Evans in the National Security Division.

And he's asking the right questions over and over again. And they basically, I mean, the word lie is not used in the inspector general's report. But it is hard not to feel like he was intentionally misled despite asking the right questions. And so you walk away thinking that the FISA process is quite broken, that it's broken because of human reasons. It's broken because of institutional reasons. And then you have this one lone brave attorney out there is trying. And it is this like glimmer of hope at the end of the movie that maybe things could turn out all right in the future. You know, it's interesting when I was when earlier in this process, when the first allegations of FISA abuse started to surface, I talked to an FBI attorney who was involved in the FISA process and had been involved for years.

And they were saying, look, they found it difficult to believe that the FISA abuse could occur as people suspected, because one of the things they kept telling me is the attorneys ask probing questions. Yep. Yeah, it's the biggest defense you'll hear. And in this case, you know, I have one attorney as the hero of my story. There's another attorney who is the bad guy in the story. And that's one of the attorneys in the Office of General Counsel of the FBI who alters an email to add this information in. And let's just take a little, can we take a side jaunt of this altered email? So it turns on whether Page is working with a, quote, other government agency. Page has confirmed that this is the CIA, but it is not mentioned in the IG report, which other agency.

So here's the problem that they have. is working for the CIA and the CIA is trusting his information on that front and the FBI is investigating him as a Russian colluder on the other side, those two things don't match up very well. And so this attorney alters some information that he's putting in in the form of an email to change it to not a source for another government agency because he has to marry up these two problems. And he decides the way to marry them up is to say, nope, he's just a Russian colluder. He is not also working with the CIA. And it not I mean, the term of art is material facts relevant to the court to determine probable cause. It's a very material fact. Oh, that's an absolutely material fact. And that's a material misstatement of fact.

Yeah, that's so, you know, that was one of the problems with the information provided in the FISA report. And here's another one that stuck out to me. And that was the puffery around Steele. So, you know, one of the things that if you're sitting there and saying, okay, I can understand why the FBI would in good faith rely upon Christopher Steele if in the past he had provided high quality intelligence, that he had provided high quality information. And, you know, what's the old saying, Fool me once, shame on you. If this was a fool me once, well, shame on you, Christopher Steele. But it turns out that they exaggerated the quality of the information that he had provided previously. And so this wasn't somebody who had been sort of this highly valued, indispensable resource. But they were engaged in a little bit of a sales job. Oh, let's take a little jaunt down the Woods File lane. So no one ever before this podcast. Here we are going down the Woods File lane.

So every fact in a FISA has to be backed up and validated. And that backup validation is called the woods file. And so you can puff all you want about Christopher steel and the FISA, not really, but even so you then need to back that up in the woods file. Those facts, especially when it comes to a source like Steele in the Woods file, would need to be reviewed by his handling agent.

And one thing that the IG points out multiple times is when they are puffing up Steele, including that his information had led to criminal investigation material, the handling agent never got to review that in the woods file and said he would not have signed off on that because in fact that had never happened. Uh, and so you've just got failure after failure. And of course we haven't even gotten to the fact that Christopher Steele, you know,

the biggest hit on Christopher Steele that sort of out there publicly is he's doing all this. He's getting paid to do all this for a political purpose, doing opposition research for a company that is providing that to the Hillary Clinton campaign. And this is where my my hero attorney in the IG report comes in because he arm wrestles this back and forth. And they do include a footnote that says it might be the case. That was the compromise that they got to. But what's interesting and what I don't think will get enough attention is we all know about Christopher Steele and opposition research and the political side. That is only one of the relatively small issues compared to the other.

I mean, the IG bullet points this, this problem and this problem and this problem. And those other issues are much more, I think, fundamental to the FISA process, frankly. Well, you know, and not only are they there, so the disclosure, I've long thought that the argument that the disclosure was inadequate was not the best argument because the words on the page mean this was oppo research. And and the bias of the the bias involved in creating oppo research is plain and obvious and manifest. And it is simply not the case that the FBI or any law enforcement agency gets their information typically from unbiased sources. Usually a source, somebody who's going to turn on someone really wants to see them fall. And if you watched a Law & Order episode, you know that the CIs are rarely good guys in all this.

No, they're not. Yeah, they have they have axes to grind. They have I mean, so everyone's used to dealing with biased sources. I thought the disclosure was fine. It could have been better, but it wasn't the top. It wasn't the top of mind scandal. But the failure to include some of the pretty plainly exculpatory evidence that had been generated over the months after the initial FISA was granted, I thought that that was some, including denials from relevant individuals, persistent denials, emphatic denials. Now, a denial does not mean that a research warrant shouldn't be granted, right?

I mean, this isn mean, this is a probable cause standard. It's lower than proof beyond reasonable doubt. It's lower than preponderance evidence. It's probable cause. But when you have exculpatory information, and of course, there's no defense attorney involved in this process, you're presenting the whole picture to the FISA court judge. And to just omit it on a wholesale basis was another one of the really troubling aspects of this, at least to me. And you have Steele even saying that one of his subsources, you know, he is not the primary source for this information. He's doing some open source. He's talking to his own sources. So one of his subsources, he even says is not

reliable. He's a boaster. He's an egoist. He may engage in some embellishment. Those are direct quotes from Steele in the IG report. None of that's included. Yeah. So, I mean, I just I kept reading this page after page after page, bullet point after bullet point. And I'm thinking, you know, all of these people that I'm reading on Twitter who are saying that the FBI has vindicated here, what the heck are you talking about? I mean, this FISA and the repeated renewals for page, and IG is careful to say he's not opining on legal sufficiency,

but he is opining on the omissions. And the omissions, I think, go directly to legal sufficiency, but he is opining on the omissions. And the omissions, I think, go directly to legal sufficiency. And it just looks like a bad FISA. It just, even under a probable cost standard, it just looks like a bad FISA. And even if the first one can be excused in some way by the fact that the additional investigation of Steele's information had not yet been done. The follow-up warrant renewals, it's looking rough. Well, that's where I think the IG perhaps needed another section. I understand that a lot of people wanted to concentrate on political bias affecting the opening of the investigation. But I think we could have had and would have benefited from the IG spending some time on whether, you know, we can

argue over whether it should have been in between the second renewal and the third renewal. But in that timeline where they now have negative information, they're not backing up their claims. It's getting undermined. And then you have this same group of people and we can get to the separate meetings that they're having where they're not inviting the criminal team, the MLARS team, even though they're, you know, it's a mess. And what's the MLARS team for listeners? That's money laundering. So that's the Manafort money laundering case. Uh, and, uh, that's where it gets weird.

I can't think of a better word. It's getting weird that this group of people who clearly do not like the president, I'm not even sure it's political. I don't know that this is a Republican versus Democrat thing, but they don't like president Trump, uh, president elect Trump,

depending on exactly when we're going to pin this to. But they are going to push this no matter what. And there's nothing it appears to me that there's nothing they could have seen that would have convinced them to close this investigation, to put it, you know, less resources towards it even. And that's where I think the I.G. perhaps skims over. Maybe he did not find evidence of political bias in opening it. Why don't we look halfway through or January 2017 and what's going on? What is causing them to have these blinders on and to move forward no matter what? Yeah. And there's another aspect of that that's related to it.

So they're plowing forward on Carter Page. And at this point, it's pretty clear that Carter Page is an absolute nobody in Trump world. He's just a nobody. I mean, some of the information in here, what was it? He had never had a communication with Manafort. People wouldn't answer his emails. I mean, this is a guy who, and you've been around campaigns. I mean, this is a guy who and you've been around campaigns. I mean, you know, the type he's somebody who's was a hanger on for a short time. And they are. I'm making that like an awkward face emoji because like, yeah, it's awkward. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so he's he is a side. He's even calling him a side figure almost elevates this guy.

He was an irrelevancy in the course of this campaign. Now, on the flip side, though, wait, wait. On the other hand, it's not like the Trump campaign was so well organized that you and I could write an org chart of who the foreign policy advisers were. They were a victim of their own flailing at this point. I think if they had had a really set domestic policy team, foreign policy team with a head of policy and these people, it would be much easier to say, obviously, Carter Page is nothing. He's not included on any of their weekly phone calls of which white papers they're working on. That doesn't exist like it would on a normal campaign. Yeah, that is very true. There was chaos, a mild bit of chaos in play. But it seems to me that if you're going into December, January, February, into 2017, you're talking about, at this point, it's pretty clear this guy wasn't really anybody. Papadopoulos also not really a key player. And, you know, but can I just, there was one part of this that I thought was

kind of interesting. It just shows how Papadopoulos was not a key player. They talk about how he had completely discounted the idea that anyone would reach out to WikiLeaks through the campaign. We wouldn't do that. Nobody was doing that. Well, in fact, people in the campaign were trying to get Roger Stone to set up a back channel to WikiLeaks. Of course, that's not in this report because apparently at this point, the FBI had no idea that that was occurring. It really is interesting to me after reading Mueller and while reading this, that there was a lot going on in that summer of 2017 and into the fall, or 2016 and into the fall, that apparently the FBI had no knowledge of, or they wouldn't have been continuing to pursue Carter Page in the way they were pursuing Carter Page. They were on a dry, they were going down a dry

hole here. And it was only other people with other evidence that actually raised real alarms about what the Trump campaign was doing. And but for that, we wouldn't even know about Bianca the dog, my favorite character from that era. More Bianca. Now, tell listeners about Bianca the dog, because that's not a household name, unlike Conan the dog who killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. No, Conan the dog is a hero dog, but Bianca deserves her own playing card, I think. So this is Credico's dog,

and Credico's related to the Roger Stone case. And it's, you want to go down a whole nother rabbit hole, but just, you know, Google Bianca. If you want to see a white fluffy dog who is doing the best by her owner. Well, you know, the, the Credico Roger Stone. Oh gosh. Why am I blanking on the third guy? The conspiracy theorist Corsi. Why am I blanking on the third guy? The conspiracy theorist, Corsi. Yes, Credico, Roger Stone, and Corsi could really remake Three Stooges.

With Bianca as an important side character. With Bianca as a side character. Absolutely. So here we have Papadopoulos and Page as a focus of this. And nothing, and this is, I think you raise a really good point that I have not seen online. So this is the content you're going to get in advisory opinions and the insight you're going to get in advisory opinions you're not going to get on that garbage site called Twitter. And that is

okay, opening the investigation, got it. Continuing it under these facts. And now I do think regardless, there would have been a comprehensive counterintelligence investigation of what Russia was trying to do that would have uncovered Manafort reaching out and sharing polling data that would have uncovered this sort of credit codes that the law firm of credit codes, Stone and Corsi, that would have the Donald Trump Tower meeting, the Trump Tower meeting with Donald Jr. Hey, that came through media, not through law enforcement. Well, don't forget, there is this nugget in there that Manafort was under investigation pre-joining the campaign. Exactly. For money laundering. For money laundering. Yes.

And there's no suggestion that that was inappropriate. So there's just, I keep looking at this thing and these two words just go through my mind time and time again. 2016, man. That's your bumper sticker, huh? 2016, man. I mean, think about this. So I have a theory. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. The Steele dossier, the most malignant single document created in American politics in the last 10 years, yes or no? Oh, now I want to take a second, right? I want to prove you wrong. Here's one way I'll prove you wrong. It's not a single document. Well, right. OK. Well, the PDF that was compiled and released by BuzzFeed. How about that?

Interesting. Well, I'll I'll marinate on this as we continue. I'll marinate on this as we continue. Speaking of which, so steel is then cut by the FBI for a variety of reasons that matter. They don't matter. Basically his work on the political side, violate some of the FBI's rules. He's talking to reporters.

He's becoming a more forward facing member of the oppo team that's going on at fusion GPS. So they drop him and by the way we don't talk about um payments etc in the ig report which is interesting but regardless steel isn't done as a source when that is the case you cannot initiate contact with the source obvious but you also cannot answer uh outreaches from the source. So when your source then comes back, it's like, wait, I've got something else for you. You can't take that call black and white. So what do they do instead? They, they send someone else. So that's where Bruce or comes in, uh, steel. Well, the FBI and or steel use, or who is an attorney in the deputy attorney general's office at this point,

career attorney, um, who does criminal work on, uh, large criminal organizations, basically. So unrelated, totally unrelated to this.

Uh, they use him as a cutout. His wife, as we all know now, was a contractor working for Fusion GPS. Steele is a contractor working for Fusion GPS. They all go to brunch together. At some point, this is in the IG report, Broussard realizes that having his wife at this brunch discussing all of this in front of her is maybe not a good idea. It's unclear how they have then this private conversation on the side.

I immediately think bathroom break. I was just going to say that. Sounds like a bathroom trip. I know, but like this is something, you know, ladies do a lot where we, you know, like first date stuff, double date. You're like, oh, do you need to go to the restroom? I just, I mean, in case you guys, I hope all men are aware of this. Like we're almost never going to the bathroom on those trips. Nobody needs to go to the bathroom.

It is zero for that. So that's what I'm picturing happening. Years ago, you'd say smoke break. Oh, interesting. Yeah. That's, you know, maybe a vape break, but I doubt it. How my dry cleaning bill has fallen since smoking has. Yeah, I mean, so they're violating their own rules.

They are still using steel material, but now they're using it through Bruce or for months, more than months. A really long time. More than months. A really long time. And that is how Bruce Orby comes then. I don't want to call him a household name, but part of the cabal of these other names of, again, very senior people at the department and at the FBI.

And it is the next section of the IG's report, which you almost feel the bewilderment of the IG in that section, the WTF-ness of the whole thing. Yeah. Yes, it's so plainly, obviously wrong. And the thing that I keep coming back to is, on the one hand, as the IG points out, there are a missing set of procedures that should perhaps be created when you're dealing with an FBI investigation of a presidential campaign. Maybe maybe there's a way in which sort of their sensitive matters. There should be another category for super sensitive matters that can split the nation apart in fear in a furious bout of enraged polarization. apart in a furious bout of enraged polarization. But it's obvious that their procedures are inadequate to the moment. But then what do all these career folks do, senior ranking career folks in the FBI do? They act as if they're never going to be held to account for this stuff,

that they're never going to be asked to explain or that this will be publicly outlined in a way that they're going to have to go to the American people and say, yeah, yeah, this this is the best way to do this. I think the best example of that is pre inauguration, based on my reading of it. They have an ODNI, a director of national intelligence briefing for the incoming team that includes Michael Flynn, among others. And the FBI representative who goes is intentionally a member of the investigative team on Crossfire Hurricane. And they consider that meeting to be an investigative one yeah without telling anyone at the department any like oh god like it was so cringeworthy to read that because to your point

it just felt like did you never think that you were the were you planning to defend this and what did you think the defense was that, because think about the implications of this for future administrations. Every security briefing could be an investigation into you. Anything you say can and will be used against you as you are supposed to be being briefed on the biggest threats to the nation. There's been reports that various senior members of the administration weren't taking their security briefing seriously. And I guess I would just say, and here might be a reason of the distrust between the IC and the administration. And I'm not saying it's acceptable or warranted in any way. What I'm saying is this, going back to my point about culture, this is the stuff that has to get fixed.

So let me ask you this. Do you let's just put on your your your pop psychology hat. My favorite hat. Yes. Well, that's not the exact right term, but let's say you're let's let's suppose you're the you're the analyst of these. say you're let's let's suppose you're the you're the analyst of these folks you're analyzing these folks uh decision making do you think that they thought it was going to all come out fine because they believed they were going to have the goods and they were going to be the the team that exposed it um because you know when you have a successful prosecution let's say you you send a gaudy to jail, there are often elements of that prosecution that are bad. You'll have suppression motions that evidence was collected unconstitutionally. You'll have a henchman who walks because that prosecution was so bad, whatever.

But the fundamental bottom line story is we got it. And everyone who's involved in that's a hero. And it feels to me like they're beginning with this. It just feels to me like this is the kind of thing you do when you are pretty darn sure that you know what the ultimate outcome is going to be. Well, let me use a more concerning example. I have worked on cases where defendants, including one who was on death row, was framed. Prosecutors and police don't frame people who they believe to be innocent. At least I have not seen that happen. They hide evidence or manufacture evidence against people they believe to be guilty. evidence or manufacture evidence against people they believe to be guilty. I have no doubt in reading all of this,

that they truly believed that this was true and that it was just a matter of proving it. They were not using these investigative techniques against innocent people. Yeah. But the problem is like pride cometh before the fall on that one. More attorneys should be disbarred and prosecutors should be disbarred for hiding Brady material because of that exact reason. You're I just don't think you're ever going to find a prosecutor who wants to put someone on death row who's innocent. But some of them are willing to put people away who they just believe we couldn't quite prove we're guilty. And that's that's the damning part. It's in that tiny little space that lies the world.

Well, let me make another argument for my theory about the malignancy of the Steele dossier. I have if you look at the alacrity with which they ratcheted up the effort to get the Carter Page FISA after they got the Steele dossier, I have long thought that what the Steele dossier did effectively was create what people thought the blueprint of what they were going to prove. That this was the, yeah, it was rumors, yeah, it was secondhand information, but it was basically true. And so therefore, the whole effort from the moment the Steele dossier sort of took this to another level was, this is the blueprint. This is right here, the blueprint for what this campaign is really like and what Trump is really like. And certainly that is the case in much of left-wing. And certainly that is the case in much of

left wing media. Certainly that's the case in much of left wing media. And I wonder how much that was the case inside this team. I suppose we'll never know, but that's what I wonder. Well, that's where the text messages become relevant and they were, you know, relevant to Congress and turned over to Congress. Yeah, it is. This is the cultural dilemma that I think Chris Wray and Bill Barr have before them. And so but we haven't totally talked about everyone's statements and maybe we sort of wrap on some of this point. Chris Wray has given an interview to ABC News tonight. Bill Barr has put out a statement and John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, who is charged with sort of the criminal side of all of this, has put out an odd statement as well. Yeah. So who do you want to take out of

those three? Who do you want? OK, let me go with one of Barr's statements. So, okay, okay, here we go. Here we go. We're going to go with Barr's statement, and this goes back to the inception of the investigation. And so here's what Barr says. The inspector general found the only information relied on to open the FBI's counterintelligence investigation was supplied to the FBI by a friendly foreign government, FFG. I want to emphasize that this FFG did the right thing in supplying that information. In other words, we have no beef with you, Australia. The FFG has acted at all times just as we would hope a close ally would.

We are grateful that we have such friends. What was subsequently done with that information by the FBI presents a separate question. Subsequently done with that information by the FBI presents a separate question. And so what this is saying, Barr is saying, is I'm not going to necessarily get on board with the idea that that information from the FFG was enough to get this started, that there's more to this story. And if all he's saying is, in my view, the information for the FFG wasn't enough, that's one thing. If he's saying there's more to this story, that's when you need to have some of the goods for that. Yeah, because this is a 476-page story right now. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

But here's the thing that's not exactly right, and this was kind of stuck in my craw about that statement. He says the only information relied on to open the counterintelligence investigation was this report from the Australian diplomat. No, no, there was it was happening against the background of very particular facts that were actually extremely concerning and disturbing. It isn't that there was no evidence of Russian interference and some diplomat says, oh, you know, I heard such and such. That would be a different circumstance. And so I felt that that was a little bit deceptive. So that was, that's my bone to pick there. So that's my that's that's me on bar. What do you go next? All right. We'll do a quick hit on on John Durham statement.

The U.S. attorney in Connecticut worth pointing out, he was acting U.S. attorney at the end of Bill Clinton's tenure for Connecticut. He was also acting U.S. attorney in EDVA during mid Obama years. U.S. attorney in EDVA during mid-Obama years. So this, and he's been in the department, I mean, almost literally since I was born. I predate his AUSA tenure only by a little. And so that's all to say, like this is, he's been around the block. He did put out an odd statement. He is investigating this still. So his investigation is ongoing. And he says that he informed the IG last month that he does not agree with the IG's conclusions, that no political bias infected the opening of the investigation. And it's very short and it kind of just stops there. And we're left with this dot, dot, dot moment.

On the one hand, a lot of people on Twitter angry that he said anything about an ongoing investigation. On the other hand, it's relevant to all of us that he does not agree with it. And again, I am inclined to lean back on his 30 years of working in the department under many, many administrations. And I think we should just stay tuned for stay tuned. Last bit though, is on Chris Ray.

So Chris Ray obviously knows this is coming. He scheduled an interview with ABC news. I think that's very smart of him. Pierre Thomas is one of the best reporters highly commend all of his reporting to you listeners of advisory opinions and the president had tweeted look how things have turned around on the criminal deep state pierre thomas then asked ray do you believe there's a deep state you know ask him about this term deep state. And Ray says, I think that's the kind of label that's a disservice to the men and women who work at the FBI,

who I think tackle their jobs with professionalism, with rigor, with objectivity, with courage. So that's not a term I would ever use to describe our workforce. And I think it's an affront to them. Shots fired. I mean, meow. Meow. Now, he also says, Ray, the actions described in this report, he considers unacceptable and unrepresentative of who we are in an institution. And then he says, but it's important that the inspector general found in this particular instance the investigation was opened with appropriate predication and authorization.

So there's a lot of Chris Ray on the one hand. On the other hand, I think I've pointed out throughout our podcast today, what a tough spot I think Chris Ray is in. I think he has work cut out from far beyond anything this report has because of the cultural implications of how this sort of thing happens in the first place. But the good news is that team is all gone. Chris Wray has all new people around him. And I think that should give Americans a lot of confidence in what he's doing. I think, though, that between the president calling his employees deep state to a 476 page IG report, which, as you and I have said, there's maybe like 10 pages that are good news.

You're right, exactly. You know, if you're putting anyone in your thoughts and prayers tonight, maybe add Chris Ray to that list. Yeah, well said. Well, let's end with a little tinfoil havery, shall we? Ooh. Yes, okay. So there's a loose end here.

If I am, and you know, aren't we all steeped in MAGA Twitter and know very well sort of all the various theories here? There is a loose end. And here here is that loose end. That loose end is the idea that Joseph Mifsud, Joseph Mifsud, who was the professor who allegedly talked to George Papadopoulos about dirt on Hillary. The question is, was he an American or allied asset? In other words, was this a plant? Was this an entrapment? And there's I shall read you footnote 164. Oh, I love it when the nerd starts going to footnote 164. But just to be clear, when my students do stuff like this, I assume they actually have not read one through 163.

They picked a random footnote to make me think that they'd read all the footnotes. But please go ahead. We'll pretend like you read them all. Oh, yes. Well, absolutely every syllable. But this is the kind of nerdery you're going to get in this podcast. I'm just going to warn you. Footnote 164. October 25th, 2018 testimony for the House Judiciary House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. Papadopoulos stated that the source of the information he shared with a foreign government official was a professor from London, Joseph Mifsud. Papadopoulos raised the possibility during the testimony that Mifsud might have been working with the FBI and this was some sort of operation to attract Papadopoulos. As discussed in Chapter 10, the OIG searched the FBI database of confidential human sources and did not find any records indicating

that Mifsud was a confidential human source or that Mifsud's discussions with Papadopoulos were part of any FBI operation. Okay, so that seems pretty clear. In Chapter 10, we also note that the FBI requested information redacted. There are very few redactions throughout the 476 pages, but it turns out, I suppose, that tinfoil hats can live even in the smallest crevices. Yes, yes. So the tinfoil hat that remains is in those two lines of redacted text. So maybe one day we will know what is there.

Well, David, it's been a treat. Yeah, this has been fun. Happy IG report to you. Well, and hopefully every one of our podcasts won't feature breaking down 500 pages of which 490 are discussions of government wrongdoing. Next week, we do Blackstone's law commentaries. Nice. Nice. No, next week, we're going to talk about the Wonder Woman trailer. Oh, you know, they filmed a lot of that out of outside. Not a lot. They filmed one scene outside DOJ and I actually got to go see it and meet her. It like it. I have a lot to say about that, actually. So we did not discuss this in advance that we were going to talk about that. But I have things to say. Well, there you have it. Next episode,

Sarah Isker discusses her close personal relationship with Gal Gadot. Excellent. Well, this has been episode one of the Advisory Opinions podcast, and please subscribe on iTunes or any other service that hosts podcasts. Please leave us a review. I know you only have one episode so far to listen to, but please leave us a review. It helps a lot, especially as we get started. And we look forward to talking to you again soon. Thanks so much for listening. © transcript Emily Beynon