17 Mistakes, Omissions & Deliberate Deceptions

17 Mistakes, Omissions & Deliberate Deceptions
The View from the Middle

I worked for Procter & Gamble for 37 years, a company that made “the one-page memo” famous. Richard Deupree, P&G CEO from 1930 to 1947, championed this idea to make communications thoughtful, concise, compelling and easy for the receiver of to understand. Our government’s philosophy on written communications seems to be the very antithesis of the one-page memo. Their reports are so long and tedious and cumbersome that they actually discourage “We the People” from even reading them.

The latest example is the Inspector General, Michael Horowitz’s, report on the FISA abuses by the FBI with respect to their investigation collusion with the Russians by the Trump campaign. This report is 434 pages long written in legalese, loaded with acronyms and with more footnotes than pages. I estimate that less than one percent of the American people with even read the Executive Summary, which is almost 20 pages long. Consequently, I felt a need to translate and simplify this governmental jibber-jabber for my readers and focus on the real essence of Mr. Horowitz’s report - the 17 inaccuracies, omissions and deliberate deceptions. Read my “one-page memo” on these 17 examples of gross incompetence and or absolute deceit below and make your own judgements.

1) The FBI omitted information obtained from another governmental agency that Carter Page was a cooperating “operational contact” working with our government and providing information on Russian intelligence officers.
2) They asserted that Christopher Steele’s prior reporting had been “corroborated and used in criminal proceedings” which overstated Steele’s past reporting. This violated the FBI’s “Woods Procedures” which requires facts in a FISA request to be “scrupulously accurate” and verified.
3) They omitted information relevant to the reliability of a key Steele sub-source, namely that Steele himself had called him a boaster and egoist who may engage embellishment and that the FBI had opened an investigation on this person before the FISA application had been filed.
4) The FBI lied when they asserted that Steele did not provide the press information for September 23rd Yahoo News article.
5) They omitted Papadopoulos’s statements in September of 2016 denying that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was collaborating with Russian or with any outside group like Wikileaks in the release of emails.
6) They omitted Carter Page’s statement in September of 2016 that he had “literally never met” or “said one word to” Paul Manafort, and that Paul Manafort had not responded to nay of Page’s emails.
7) They omitted statements from Page that were inconsistent with the FBI’s theory, including denying having ever met Igor Sechin or Igor Divyekin (two allies of Vladimir Putin) or even knowing who Divyekin was.
8) They omitted the fact that Steele’s primary sub-source had made statements in January of 2017 raising significant questions out the reliability of allegations included in the FISA applications.
9) THIS IS A BIG ONE – The OGC (Office of General Counsel) Attorney altered an email from another agency to state that Carter Page was “not a source” for the other agency, when the memo confirmed that he actually was!!
10) Omitted information from reliable sources that suggested Steele “demonstrates a lack of self-awareness (and) poor judgement”. Also, that Steele “pursued people with political risk but no intelligence value” and that Steele didn’t always exercise great judgement” and it was “not clear what he would have done to validate” his reporting.
11) Omitted information from Bruce Ohr about Steele’s reporting, including A) Steele’s reporting was going to the Clinton campaign B) Glen Simpson of GPS was paying Steele to discuss his reporting to the media, and C) Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the US President”.
12) They failed to update the description of Steele after information became known that provided greater clarity on the political origins of Steele’s reporting, including that Simpson was hired by someone associated with the Democratic Party and / or the DNC.
13) They failed to correct the assertion in the first FISA application that the FBI did “not” believe that Steele directly provide information to the reporter who wrote the September 23rd Yahoo News article.
14) They omitted the finding by the FBI that Steele’s past contributions had been found to be “minimally corroborated” and instead continued to assert that Steele’s reporting had been “corroborated and used in criminal proceedings”.
15) Omitted Papadopoulos’s statements in late October of 2016 denying that the Trump campaign was involved in the circumstances of the DNC email hack.
16) They omitted Joseph Misfud’s denial that he supplied Papadopoulos with the information he shared with the FFG (Friendly Foreign Government) suggesting the campaign received an offer of assistance from Russia).
17) They omitted information indicating that Page played no role in the Republican platform change on Russia’s annexation of Ukraine, which was inconsistent with a factual assertion relied upon to support probable cause in all four of the FISA applications.

Michael Horowitz suggested that he “found no documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivations influenced the FBI’s decisions”, which simply means that no one confessed to bias verbally or in writing. He also admitted that he, “did not receive satisfactory explanations for the errors or problems (h)e identified.”

Thankfully, this is America and we have the right and privilege to make a judgement and decide for ourselves what was driving this abundance of errors, omissions and deliberate falsification of evidence. Unfortunately, our only choices are gross negligence, incompetence or political bias. All would leave a horrible stain on the FBI for years to come, but there are two factors that keep bringing me back to the fact that bias was the motive. First, if the FBI was just incompetent, errors would have been made equally for and against the Trump campaign. The odds that all 17 errors, etc. would be made randomly in one direction (like 17 straight coin flips coming up heads) are one in 131,072 or .000763%. No thinking person needs documentary or testimonial evidence to conclude that these particular FISA applications reeked of political bias.