{"id":1428,"date":"2018-02-08T17:20:14","date_gmt":"2018-02-09T01:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=1428"},"modified":"2018-02-12T19:24:54","modified_gmt":"2018-02-13T03:24:54","slug":"is-fbi-attorney-lisa-page-a-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=1428","title":{"rendered":"Is FBI Attorney Lisa Page a Hero?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Fb-Button\"\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>
<\/fb:like><\/div>
<\/div><\/div>

This week, Senator Ron Johnson released an interim report on the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Email Scandal.\u00a0 (See February 6, 2018 at\u00a0https:\/\/www.hsgac.senate.gov\/library<\/a>.)\u00a0 The Report itself isn’t so interesting, mainly a list of facts and allegations that seem salacious to right-wingers, but don’t really amount to anything in particular.\u00a0 The accompanying documents are what interested me.\u00a0 But one thing that irks me about the memo is the careless misinterpretation of the law.\u00a0 The memo includes a whole section on “the law governing the protection of classified information,” which includes both a verbatim text of the law, as well as a misleading summary.\u00a0 For example, the committee says “Section 793(f) prohibits the mishandling of classified material through one\u2019s gross negligence.”\u00a0 Well, no.\u00a0 The word “mishandling” appears nowhere in the law.\u00a0 “Mishandling” is much too vague a term to be used in a criminal statute.\u00a0 Instead, the law at issue (enacted 100 years ago during World War I) makes it illegal to permit the “removal” of documents, or to fail to report their removal.\u00a0 Here’s the big problem for all those trying to suggest that Hillary Clinton committed a violation of this statute.\u00a0 There is no “removal<\/strong>” of documents when you send an e-mail.\u00a0 I’ve explained this before in a previous blog<\/a> but it deserves repeating.\u00a0 There is simply no law that could make simply sending and receiving e-mails from a private server to authorized recipients into a crime.<\/p>\n

I am certainly not the first lawyer to realize this.\u00a0 No doubt there were lawyers at the FBI and the DOJ who also understood that nothing that Hillary Clinton did with regard to her e-mails could ever result in a criminal conviction.\u00a0 Sadly, no one ever tried to explain this to the American public.\u00a0 Months before FBI Director James Comey’s public statements in July 2016, he and his staff began preparing for the day when they might have to explain that there was no case.\u00a0 They did this while they were still conducting interviews of witnesses, which Republicans believe is evidence that the investigation was not conducted properly.\u00a0 In fact, all it shows is that the FBI and DOJ were afraid to tell the Republicans that the entire investigation was not worth anyone’s time.<\/p>\n

For FBI lawyers like Lisa Page, the pointless, obviously political investigation of Hillary Clinton must have been frustrating.\u00a0 She was assigned tasks that she and her colleagues knew were never going to lead to the prosecution of any crimes.\u00a0 It was all politics — and not her politics.\u00a0 Unlike much of the FBI rank and file, Lisa wanted Hillary Clinton to win. And Peter Sztrok, an agent that Lisa worked closely with on counterintelligence cases, felt the same way.\u00a0 The two of them became close — too close.\u00a0 They started an affair, and began texting each other throughout the day.<\/p>\n

Those texts have now been released by Senator Johnson, giving us some insight into not only Page and Sztrok, but some of the senior management of the FBI.<\/p>\n

Here are a few of the (to me) more interesting portions of the released text messages:<\/p>\n

What was Lisa Page referring to when she texted to Peter Sztrok about Rep. Jason Chaffetz on the evening of October 26?\"\"<\/a>Bill is Bill Priestap, head of counterintelligence and Peter Sztrok’s boss.<\/p>\n

On October 27, 2016<\/strong>, FBI Director James Comey held a meeting where he says that his team unanimously concluded that he had no choice but to reopen the email investigation and notify Congress.\u00a0 Last year, Comey testified that only one “junior lawyer” spoke up and suggested that maybe he was going to interfere in the election. We don’t know yet who that junior lawyer was.\u00a0 It could have been Lisa Page, but she’s not so junior, and now it looks like FBI general counsel James Baker excluded her from the big meeting because of “optics” (whatever that means).\u00a0 Read the exchanged from the afternoon of October 27 below.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Outbox are from Lisa Page.\u00a0 Inbox are from Peter Sztrok<\/a>.\u00a0 JB is FBI general counsel James Baker (Lisa’s boss).\u00a0 He was reassigned last month<\/a>.\u00a0 Toscas is Deputy Attorney General George Toscas. Michael Kortan<\/a> is the Assistant Director of the Office of Public Affairs. He manages the FBI’s public relations (and is probably the source of all authorized leaks).\u00a0 Andy is former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe<\/a>, who was pushed out of the loop on the e-mail case a week before these texts, after right-wing attacks based on democratic donor support for his wife’s failed Virginia state senate campaign in 2015.<\/p>\n

To me, the important part of these texts is at the end.\u00a0 “What if we can’t make out PC?”\u00a0 She’s talking about probable cause<\/strong>, the constitutional standard for obtaining a search warrant.\u00a0 As we know, the FBI obtained the warrant just four days later, on Sunday October 30.\u00a0 I and others who have reviewed the warrant application cannot find even the slightest probable cause<\/a> to believe that the FBI would obtain evidence of a crime.\u00a0 Of course, none was ever found.\u00a0 The big question has always been who thought they would find evidence of a crime and why?\u00a0 It looks like Lisa Page tried to make the argument that there was no probable cause.\u00a0 Obviously, she was overruled by\u00a0 her boss Baker , as well as Comey, who was hell-bent on proving what an aw-shucks stand-up guy he was by reopening the investigation.<\/p>\n

A few days later, on November 2<\/strong>, we find this little nugget about the ongoing effort to review the emails on Wiener’s laptop.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve long wondered why it took a week for the FBI to determine that there was no new evidence on the laptop. After all, they had already reviewed all of the e-mails.\u00a0 How hard could it be to compare them?\u00a0 Well, apparently there was a problem, maybe due to security clearance issues, that prevented the FBI from comparing the e-mails.\u00a0 Lisa was trying to break the log-jam.\u00a0 It took a week before the FBI admitted that the laptop had nothing new.\u00a0 In that week, the election was lost for Clinton.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure what to make of this next exchange from November 2.\u00a0 It sounds a bit like Sztrok and Page were trying to wall off the New York office, which may have been the source of press leaks.\u00a0 Page is angry, and frustrated that she cannot get help from Andy McCabe, who has been recused from the whole case.\u00a0 Without McCabe’s help, Page felt powerless to stop the bad actors in the New York office.\u00a0 She didn’t have much faith in Jim Baker either.\u00a0 We’ve all been there.\u00a0 The boss is good at doing lunch but pretty worthless when it comes to understanding the details.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We’re getting closer to understanding what exactly happened that led to the disaster of the Trump presidency.\u00a0 It was a comedy of errors (otherwise known as a tragedy).\u00a0 The people who understood and were capable of stopping the disaster were pushed out and excluded, because of “optics,” leaving only the bad actors and the head-in-the-clouds senior officials pretending to do the right thing, all the while doing exactly the opposite.\u00a0 Lisa Page is looking more and more like a would-be hero, someone who saw what was happening and tried to stop it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, Senator Ron Johnson released an interim report on the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Email Scandal.\u00a0 (See February 6, 2018 at\u00a0https:\/\/www.hsgac.senate.gov\/library.)\u00a0 The Report itself isn’t so interesting, mainly a list of facts and allegations that seem salacious to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1428"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1459,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1428\/revisions\/1459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}