“REMEMBERING NOTHING, LEARNING NOTHING:”
How the FBI Broke the Rules Using Christopher Steele.
Attorney General Bill Barr
recently asked a question that all Americans should be asking: “How did we get to the point where . . . the evidence is now that the president was falsely accused of colluding with the Russians and accused of being treasonous and accused of being a Russian Agent?” Barr added that the evidence now shows the accusations were “without a basis” and that “two years of his administration have been dominated by allegations that have now been proven false.”
To answer that question, we have to go back and look at two dysfunctional relationships the FBI had with confidential informants. In both cases, the FBI was duped into working for the informant rather than the other way around.
The FBI should have learned its lesson from the spectacular scandal surrounding ****** Bulger, the kingpin of the notorious Winter Hill gang in Boston whose work as an FBI informant allowed him to expand his criminal empire. As we are now seeing with Christopher Steele, of “Steele dossier” infamy, the FBI learned nothing from the Bulger case and failed to follow the guidelines put in place to prevent what happened with Bulger from happening again.
Connolly went to prison for using federal government resources to abet Bulger’s crimes. But justice wasn’t served. Then-U.S. Attorney
Robert Mueller prevented the release of evidence that would eventually lead to the exoneration and release of the wrongly convicted targets of the Connolly-Bulger conspiracy. Howie Carr of the
Boston Herald has been
warning Americans for
some time that Mueller
perpetuated the framing of four innocent men. Two of them
died in prison. The other two were released from prison after 35 years for crimes they did not commit.
Carr credits Mueller with prolonging the cover-up of the Connolly-Bulger framing of these men, causing one judge to describe as “chilling” the FBI’s defense of its reputation over the interests of justice.
“This is a case about . . . informant abuse, about the failure to disclose exculpatory evidence bearing on the innocence of the four plaintiffs . . . about . . . not disclosing critical information that would have exonerated the plaintiffs, and not doing so, for 40 years,” wrote Federal District Judge Nancy Gertner.
Steele was also known to be politically biased against Trump and, “desperate that Trump not be elected.” Solomon has also reported that the FBI withheld (or at least significantly downplayed) those derogatory facts from the FISA court in much the same way Connolly used to paper over the record to make Bulger appear more credible than he really was.
Second, the post-Bulger guidelines also warn the FBI that the information obtained from the confidential informant “must be truthful.” And we now know Steele’s desperation, or perhaps his love of money, led him to pass on information that he would
later admit could be untrue or even “deliberately false.”
Third, the guidelines require that the confidential informant must “abide by the instructions of the [FBI].” Steele was “suspended and then terminated” as an FBI source for what the bureau defined “as the most serious of violations”—an “unauthorized disclosure to the media of his relationship with the FBI.” The FBI would
later cite a news report sourced to Steele as a way of corroborating Steele—an echo chamber effect that further corrupted the investigation.
Thus, Steele not only helped trigger FBI-sponsored surveillance against his client’s political enemy, he also interfered in the ongoing presidential election by smearing candidate Trump with a public disclosure of the investigation.
Perhaps Donald Trump’s greatest unwitting accomplishment has been to shine public attention on the two-tiered justice system that, at its very center, seems to have become an instrument of political power over and against the people it is meant to serve.