With Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation entering its final stages, President Donald Trump would like investigators to answer some uncomfortable questions. Instead of chasing down false leads and pursuing questionable perjury charges which have nothing to do with Russia collusion, Trump believes the special counsel should be focused on the plot between FBI and the deep state officials to undermine the Trump campaign and ruin his election chances.
Investigating the deep state
The Russia investigation was very much on Trump’s mind just a day before he departed for Vietnam for an historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He pointed to a number of unanswered questions which have plagued the FBI and special counsel for months.
The only Collusion with the Russians was with Crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee…And, where’s the Server that the DNC refused to give to the FBI? Where are the new Texts between Agent Lisa Page and her Agent lover, Peter S? We want them now!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 24, 2019
First, Trump pointed to collusion between Russia, the Clinton campaign, and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). In 2016, Clinton and the DNC paid the opposition research firm millions to collect disparaging information on Trump.
The firm contracted with former British spy Christopher Steele, who in turn met with Russian operatives who supplied him with a highly salacious and unverifiable accusations about Trump. Rather than dismiss these lies, however, Steele compiled a dossier using these unsubstantiated rumors which was eventually used by the FBI to secure warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.
Shady server investigation
Next, Trump turned to the DNC server, which was allegedly hacked by the Russians in 2016. The entire special counsel investigation is built around the idea that Trump colluded with Moscow to hack these computers to discredit the Clinton campaign, yet the DNC repeatedly refused to let federal agents access their servers to prove these allegations.
The liberal-dominated media has overwhelmingly dismissed Trump’s concerns regarding the DNC server. Vice called Trump’s questions concerning the whereabouts of this key piece of evidence a “stupid” “conspiracy theory,” while the Daily Beast insisted that the server was “neither missing nor a server.”
On the surface, the left’s argument that the DNC acted appropriately by hiring a third-party private security firm to investigate it’s hacked servers sounds sensible and legitimate. Media outlets like Axios cited former FBI officials who claim that law enforcement rarely get access to the victim’s infrastructure in cyber-security cases.
Daily Beast writer Kevin Poulsen said it was “standard procedure” when the DNC hired the independent firm Crowdstrike to capture images of its servers and hand the evidence over to the FBI for analysis. “Every minute the FBI spends keeping the actors in play, that’s a minute I don’t get back in prepping for the election,” explained Rendition Infosec’s Jake Williams, an incident response professional interviewed by Poulsen.
“If the FBI mishandles data or, say, leaks it to the press or a political partisan, the organization places itself in jeopardy,” argued Axios contributor Joe Uchill.
Of course, who is to say that the FBI would tie up the DNC’s servers any longer than Crowdstrike did? In the same vein, why are federal law enforcement agents considered to be at a greater risk of leaking Democratic secrets than a small cyber-security firm?
Flouting protocol
The truth is that there was nothing “standard” about the DNC’s behavior when they refused to hand over their servers, an act that frustrated then-FBI Director James Comey. After making “multiple requests at different levels” to access the hacked servers, Comey told congressional investigators in January 2017 that his agents were repeatedly rebuffed by DNC officials. “We’d always prefer to have access hands-on ourselves if that’s possible,” Comey said.
When Special Counsel Robert Mueller obtained “tens of thousands” of Trump transition team emails stored on government servers last year, he certainly didn’t give the agency responsible for storing those emails the chance to hire a third-party security firm to conduct the investigation in his stead. In the case of Hillary Clinton’s infamous homebrew server, Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough was responsible for analyzing the evidence recovered — not some private, for-profit outfit hired by the Clinton campaign. (Of course, this was after Mrs. Clinton bleached the server and destroyed other devices linked to it with hammers).
The case of the disappearing texts
Finally, Trump turned to the missing text messages shared between disgraced FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Strzok was fired from the special counsel in the summer of 2017 after internal audits reviewed that the he exchanged over 10,000 text messages with Page, his adulterous lover. Many of these texts demonstrated an overwhelmingly negative bias towards Trump, and the FBI lovers even discussed an “insurance policy” to keep Trump out of office.
Unfortunately, the FBI initially reported that they were unable to retrieve all of the texts between Strzok and Page, and an inspector general investigation looking at bias in the Clinton email investigation concluded that an unknown number of messages were missing. Apparently, these texts were “lost” when the agents’ phones were reset to “factory settings.”
Missing are all of the text messages that the now-infamous FBI officials shared after joining the special counsel. Despite this, the inspector general eventually concluded that “the content of text messages exchanged between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page did not appear to be a factor in their collection, or lack thereof.”
The president has the right to be angry. The FBI has either revealed themselves to be grossly incompetent or politically compromised. In either case, Americans deserve answers.
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