Glenn Greenwald
\nThe Intercept<\/p>\n
JUST AS WAS TRUE<\/u>\u00a0when the Mueller investigation closed\u00a0without\u00a0a single American<\/em><\/a>\u00a0being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, Wednesday\u2019s\u00a0issuance of the\u00a0long-waited report<\/a>\u00a0from the Department of Justice\u2019s Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives from the U.S. media\u00a0were utter frauds<\/a>.<\/p>\n Before evaluating the media component of this scandal, the FBI\u2019s gross abuse of its power \u2013 its serial deceit \u2013 is so\u00a0grave and manifest that it requires little effort to demonstrate it. In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI \u2013 in order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter Page during the 2016 election \u2013 manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence, and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.<\/p>\n If you don\u2019t consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still\u00a0has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover \u2013 who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself \u2013 because that\u2019s what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms\u00a0as a matter of course.<\/p>\n In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It\u2019s brimming with proof of FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something that was not true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an agent of the Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications surveilled.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Just a few excerpts from the report should suffice to end any debate for rational persons about how damning it is. The focus of the first part of the IG Report was on the warrants obtained by the DOJ, at the behest of the FBI, to spy on Carter Page on the grounds that there was probable cause to believe he was an agent of the Russian government. That Page was a Kremlin agent was a widely disseminated media claim \u2013 typically asserted as fact even though it had no evidence. As a result of this media narrative, the Mueller investigation examined these widespread accusations yet concluded that \u201cthe investigation did not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.\u201d<\/p>\n The IG Report went much further, documenting a multitude of lies and misrepresentations by the FBI to deceive the FISA court into believing that probable cause existed to believe Page was a Kremlin agent. The first FISA warrant to spy on Page was obtained during the 2016 election, after Page had left the Trump campaign but weeks before the election was to be held.<\/p>\n About the warrant application submitted regarding Page, the IG Report, in its own words, \u201cfound that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are \u2018scrupulously accurate.’\u201d Specifically, \u201cwe identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s vital to reiterate this because of its gravity:\u00a0we identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n To spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of an election, one who had just been working with one of the two major presidential campaigns, the FBI touted a gossipy, unverified, unreliable rag that it had no reason to believe and every reason to distrust, but it hid all of that from the FISA court, which it knew needed to believe that the Steele Dossier was something it was not if it were to give the FBI the spying authorization it wanted.<\/p>\n In 2017, the FBI decided to seek reauthorization of the FISA warrant to continue to spy on Page, and sought and obtained it three times: in January, April and June, 2017. Not only, according to the IG Report, did the FBI repeat all of those \u201cseven significant inaccuracies and omission,\u201d but added ten additional major inaccuracies. As the Report put it: \u201cIn addition to repeating the seven significant errors contained in the first FISA application and outlined above, we identified 10 additional\u00a0significant 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the most significant new acts of deceit was that the FBI \u201comitted the fact that Steele\u2019s 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 with Person 1 concerning Wikileaks and there was \u2018nothing bad\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, Steele\u2019s own key source told the FBI that Steele was lying about what the source said: an obviously critical fact that the FBI\u00a0simply concealed from the FISA court because it knew how devastating that would be to being able to continue to spy on Page.<\/em>\u00a0As the Report put it, \u201camong the most serious of the 10 additional errors we found in the renewal applications was the FBI\u2019s failure to advise\u00a0[DOJ] 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.\u201d<\/p>\n The IG Report also found that the FBI hid key information from the court about Steele\u2019s motives: for instance, it \u201comitted information obtained from [Bruce] Ohr about Steele and his election reporting, including that (1) Steele\u2019s reporting was going to Clinton\u2019s presidential campaign and others, (2) [Fusion GPS\u2019s Glenn] Simpson was paying Steele to discuss his reporting with the media, and (3) Steele was \u201cdesperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. President.\u201d<\/p>\n If it does not bother you to learn that the FBI repeatedly and deliberately deceived the FISA court into granting it permission to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign, then it is virtually certain that you are either someone with no principles, someone who cares only about partisan advantage and nothing about basic civil liberties and the rule of law, or both. There is simply no way for anyone of good faith to read this IG Report and reach any conclusion other than that this is yet another instance of the FBI abusing its power in severe ways to subvert and undermine U.S. democracy. If you don\u2019t care about that, what do you care about?<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n But the revelations of the IG Report are not merely a massive FBI scandal. They are also a massive media scandal, because\u00a0they reveal that so much of what the U.S. media has authoritatively claimed about all of these matters for more than two years is completely false.<\/p>\n Ever since Trump\u2019s inauguration, a handful of commentators and journalists \u2013 I\u2019m included among them \u2013 have been sounding the alarm about the highly dangerous trend of news outlets not merely repeating the mistake of the Iraq War by blindly relying on the claims of security state agents but, far worse, now employing them in their newsrooms to shape the news. As Politico\u2019s media writer Jack Shafer wrote in 2018, in\u00a0an article entitled \u201cThe Spies Who Came Into the TV Studio\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n In the old days, America\u2019s top spies would complete their tenures at the CIA or one of the other Washington puzzle palaces and segue to more ordinary pursuits. Some\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0their\u00a0memoirs<\/a>. One ran for\u00a0president<\/a>. Another\u00a0died<\/a>\u00a0a few months after surrendering his post. But today\u2019s national-security establishment retiree has a different game plan. After so many years of brawling in the shadows, he yearns for a second, lucrative career in the public eye. He takes a crash course in speaking in soundbites, refreshes his wardrobe and signs a TV news contract. Then, several times a week, waits for a network limousine to shuttle him to the broadcast news studios where, after a light dusting of foundation and a spritz of hairspray, he takes a supporting role in the anchors\u2019 nighttime shows. . . .<\/p>\n [T]he downside of outsourcing national security coverage to the TV spies is obvious. They aren\u2019t in the business of breaking news or uncovering secrets. Their first loyalty\u2014and this is no slam\u2014is to the agency from which they hail. Imagine a TV network covering the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin to appreciate the current peculiarities.<\/p>\n In a perfect television world, the networks would retire the retired spooks from their payrolls and reallocate those sums to the hiring of independent reporters to cover the national security beat. Let the TV spies become unpaid anonymous sources because when you get down to it, TV spies don\u2019t want to make news\u2014they just want to talk about it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It\u2019s long been the case that CIA, FBI and NSA operatives tried to infiltrate and shape domestic news, but they at least had the decency to do it clandestinely. In 2008, the New York Times\u2019 David Barstow\u00a0won the Pulitzer Prize<\/a>\u00a0for\u00a0exposing a secret Pentagon program<\/a>\u00a0in which retired Generals and other security state agents would get hired as commentators and analysts and then \u2013 unbeknownst to their networks \u2013 coordinate their messaging to ensure that domestic news was being shaped by the propaganda of the military and intelligence communities.<\/p>\n But now it\u2019s all out in the open. It\u2019s virtually impossible to turn on MSNBC or CNN without being bombarded with former Generals, CIA operatives, FBI agents and NSA officials who now work for those networks as commentators and, increasingly, as\u00a0reporters.<\/em><\/p>\n https:\/\/twitter.com\/sam_vinograd\/status\/1196926004431900674?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1196926004431900674&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheintercept.com%2F2019%2F12%2F12%2Fthe-inspector-generals-report-on-2016-fb-i-spying-reveals-a-scandal-of-historic-magnitude-not-only-for-the-fbi-but-also-the-u-s-media%2F<\/p>\n The past three years of \u201cRussiagate\u201d reporting \u2013 for which U.S. journalists have lavished themselves with Pulitzers and other prizes despite a\u00a0multitude of embarrassing and dangerous errors<\/a> about the Grave Russian Threat \u2013 has relied almost exclusively on anonymous, uncorroborated claims from Deep State operatives (and yes, that\u2019s a term that fully applies to the U.S.). The few exceptions are when these networks feature former high-level security state operatives on camera to spread their false propaganda, as in this enduringly humiliating instance:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n https:\/\/twitter.com\/TerryMoran\/status\/1110010116361932800?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1110010116361932800&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheintercept.com%2F2019%2F12%2F12%2Fthe-inspector-generals-report-on-2016-fb-i-spying-reveals-a-scandal-of-historic-magnitude-not-only-for-the-fbi-but-also-the-u-s-media%2F<\/p>\n All of this has meant that U.S. discourse on these national security questions is shaped almost entirely by the very agencies that are trained to lie: the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, the FBI. And their lying has been highly effective.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For years, we were told by the nation\u2019s leading national security reporters something that was blatantly false: that the FBI\u2019s warrants to spy on Carter Page were not based on the Steele Dossier. GOP Congressman Devin Nunes was\u00a0widely vilified<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0mocked by<\/a>\u00a0the super-smart DC national security reporters for\u00a0issuing a report<\/a>\u00a0claiming that this was the case. The Nunes memo in essence claimed what the IG Report has corroborated: that embedded within the FBI\u2019s efforts to obtain FISA court authorization to spy on Carter Page was a series of misrepresentations, falsehoods and concealment of key evidence:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yes. I am telling you the dossier was not used as the basis for a FISA warrant on Carter Page.<\/p>\n — Shane Harris (@shaneharris) January 12, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n