More evidence of no evidence
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Newly released documents reveal the FBI never had even preliminary evidence of a Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia, and instead used a rarely enforced statutory relic – the Foreign Agents Registration Act – as the legal rationale for opening investigations in 2016-2017 and surveilling Trump campaign aides.
On July 31, 2016, the FBI opened a counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign’s alleged ties with Russia – nicknamed Crossfire Hurricane – not under espionage conspiracy laws but under FARA.
The next month the FBI opened four separate FARA cases into people associated with the Trump campaign. Two other FARA cases were added the next year. Only one involved an individual with connections to Russia: Carter Page.
The recently disclosed documents, which surfaced thanks to declassification efforts, court filings and FOIA lawsuits, reveal that the initial target of the probe – then-Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos -- was suspected of working for Israel, not Russia. Other FARA cases involved alleged ties to Turkey (Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn), Ukraine (campaign manager Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates) and Egypt (Trump Mideast adviser Walid Phares).
All six sensitive cases were approved through the Justice Department’s counterintelligence and export control section, run at the time by former Justice official David Laufman.
Before the flurry of Trump-related cases, only three people had been found guilty of violating the seldom-enforced law since 1966. Passed in the run-up to World War II to curb Nazi propaganda, FARA mainly requires people to fill out a two-page form disclosing work on behalf of a foreign entity.
Nevertheless, the FBI used FARA as the basis for a wide-ranging probe of a presidential campaign and then a presidency that included the use of confidential sources to secretly record Trump’s advisers, according to a December report by the Justice Department’s watchdog. At the same time, the FBI dispatched agents to tail them, stake out their homes and dig through their trash — none of which is typically ordered in FARA probes, which rarely even result in fines.
As has been widely reported, Obama administration officials also resurrected an even older and less frequently used law, the Logan Act of 1799, to raise questions about Flynn’s contacts with Russia’s ambassador to Washington during the transition to the Trump administration. Only two people have ever been charged under the statute barring unauthorized citizen dealings with foreign governments – both before the Civil War. Neither was convicted.
The revelation is contained in a redacted version of the Electronic Communication obtained last month by Judicial Watch as part of a FOIA lawsuit the Washington watchdog group filed against the FBI.
“It shows there was no serious basis for the Obama administration to launch an unprecedented spy operation on the Trump campaign," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “We now have more proof that Crossfire Hurricane was a scam.”
In August 2016, Laufman began huddling with Strzok about the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, according to the IG report, getting regular briefings on all the Trump-related cases that flowed from it.
On Aug. 10, 2016, they opened separate FARA cases on Page, Manafort and Papadopoulos, under code names assigned by the FBI. The Papadopoulos case, for instance, was code-named "Crossfire Typhoon.” Then on Aug. 16, they opened another FARA case on Flynn, under the code name, “Crossfire Razor.”
Documents indicate they strained to convert FARA cases into counterintelligence investigations. Even though the cases were predicated on possible FARA violations, the Electronic Communications stated that there was reason to believe that the Trump targets “may wittingly or unwittingly” be involved in activity on behalf of Russia, which may constitute a federal crime or threat to national security.
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Obama spent his 8 years in office politicizing and weaponizing all government agencies. Trump bashers run around yapping about how Trump "might" try to not leave office and set himself up as a dictator, in spite of the fact that there's zero evidence to support such a claim, while the evidence is overwhelming that this is exactly what Obama and the democrats were doing - not to set up an individual as dictator, but to establish the Democrat party as dictator.
