A Long Read With Something Bizarre

Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation

This Executive Summary excerpt isn't bizarre.

From the Executive Summary: 

Our review found that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are "scrupulously accurate." We 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. We found that the problems we identified were primarily caused by the Crossfire Hurricane team failing to share all relevant information with OI and, consequently, the information was not considered by the Department decision makers who ultimately decided to support the applications.

As more fully described in Chapter Five, based upon the information known to the FBI in October 2016, the first application contained the following seven significant inaccuracies and omissions:  

1.Omitted information the FBI had obtained from another U.S. government agency detailing its prior relationship with Page, including that Page had been approved as an "operational contact" for the other agency from 2008 to 2013, and that Page had provided information to the other agency concerning his prior contacts with certain Russian intelligence officers, one of which overlapped with facts asserted in the FISA application; 

2.Included a source characterization statement asserting that Steele's prior reporting had been"corroborated and used in criminal proceedings," which overstated the significance of Steele's past reporting and was not approved by Steele's handling agent, as required by the Woods Procedures; 

3. Omitted information relevant to the reliability of Person 1, a key Steele sub-source (who was attributed with providing the information in Report 95 and some of the information in Reports 80 and 102 relied upon in the application), namely that 

 ( 1) Steele himself told members of the Crossfire Hurricane team that Person 1 was a "boaster" and an "egoist" and "may engage in some embellishment" and 

 (2) the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation on Person 1 a few days before the FISA application was filed;  

4. Asserted that the FBI had assessed that Steele did not directly provide to the press information in the September 23 Yahoo News article based on the premise that Steele had told the FBI that he only shared his election-related research with the FBI and Fusion GPS, his client; this premise was incorrect and contradicted by documentation in the Woods File-Steele had told the FBI that he also gave his information to the State Department; 

 5. Omitted Papadopoulos's consensually monitored statements to an FBI CHS in September 2016 denying that anyone associated wit h the Trump campaign was collaborating with Russia or with outside groups like Wikileaks in the release of emails;  

6. Omitted Page's consensually monitored statements to an FBI CHS in August 2016 that Page had "literally never met" or "said one word to" Paul Manafort and that Manafort had not responded to any of Page's emails; if true, those statements were in tension with claims in Report 95 that Page was participating in a conspiracy with Russia by acting as an intermediary for Manafort on behalf of the Trump campaign; and  

7. Included Page's consensually monitored statements to an FBI CHS in October 2016 that the FBI believed supported its theory that Page was an agent of Russia but omitted other statements Page made that were inconsistent with its theory, including denying having met with Sechin and Divyekin, or even knowing who Divyekin was; if true, those statements contradicted the claims in Report 94 that Page had met secretly with Sechin and Divyekin about future cooperation with Russia and shared derogatory information about candidate Clinton. None of these inaccuracies and omissions were brought to the attention of OI before the last FISA application was filed in June 2017. Consequently, these failures were repeated in all three renewal applications. Further, as we discuss later, we identified 10 additional significant errors in the renewal applications.

 I have not read all 434 pages.  But I bring this to your attention because a friend noticed something odd and disturbing.  He found when examining a previous issue that searching for "Comey" failed to find many occurrences of Comey's name.  In this revision, I found 12 places where searching for "Corn" matched Comey's name but more than 50 places where "Comey" matches.  It appears that the "Corney" matches were the result of kerning the r and n into something that looks like "Comey", but cannot be found by searching.  Kerning is a feature of Microsoft Word  (look under Format Font Advanced) but this would have to be done individually for each such occurrence.  It makes it hard to find all uses of Comey's name.  My informant says the previous issue had even more such cases.  Can anyone explain this weirdness?