Economic WWIII: The Political Fallout

 

I will admit it. It is not just the economic effects of economic WWIII that I fear.  It is the political fallout.

Already Republicans are portraying 7% inflation and gas prices over $3 per gallon as an unprecedented disaster and utter ruin.  Now imagine how they will respond to all the possible results of economic warfare with Russia, or even just some of them.

Sweeping Republican landslides in 2022, with capture of the electoral machinery.  Republican victory in 2024, either by Trump himself or someone as much like him as possible.  And that not be so bad if nothing more were at stake that ordinary partisan politics -- defeat, yes, but with the proviso that no defeat is permanent, and that you can always live to fight another day.  But today's Republican Party has clearly given up on democratic politics and fancies itself as entitled to a monopoly on political power.  Give the Republicans a landslide now and expect them to entrench a one-party system like Mexico in the heyday of the PRI.

Presumably the end game of our sanctions is to bring down Putin.  I am skeptical that that will happen, or, if it does, that we will like his successor any better.  But the real fear that haunts me is that, in seeking to topple Putin, we topple our own democracy instead.

And now you know why it is hard for me to think about anything but the Ukrainian crisis.

Economic WWIII

So, let me focus on Ukraine.  The question by now is not whether there will be a war or even when.  The war has already started, with border clashes, ceasefire violations in the Donbass and the like.  I suppose there might be room to argue about the scale of the war, but I think the Russian buildup on Ukraine's borders answers that one.  The only remaining question is how long the Russians mean to stay, and in how much territory.  I don't think we can have any idea about that.

As I have said before, the good news is that the Russian invasion will not lead to WWIII.  We have ruled out military intervention.  But it will lead to economic WWIII. We may be in a position to hurt Russia, but Russia is in a position to hurt us as well. We all know that gas prices will skyrocket.  Europe receives as much as 40% of its oil from Russia.  There has never been an oil shock on that scale. Furthermore, increase oil prices have a ripple effect into all areas of the economy.  So much for inflation calming down any time soon.

Nor is it just oil.  Read this thread. It is terrifying.  

Our computer chip industry, already stretched past its limit, imports 90% of its Neon from Ukraine and 35% of its palladium from Russia.  Hypothetically, this could halt chip production altogether.  Chip manufacturers say they will get by.  I lack the knowledge to say whether this means they have alternatives, or whether it is just industry happy talk.  The article does have one reassuring comment.  Neon prices increased by 600% during the last Ukraine crisis.  The chip industry carried on.

Russia also has 25% of the world's titanium.  Military planes (for obvious reasons) do not use Russian titanium, but that just steers more commercial aircraft toward it.

Russia produces 2/3 of the world's ammonium nitrate fertilizer and stopped exporting on February 2.  This can only drive rising food prices even higher.

There will almost certainly be cyber attacks as well.  Remember that ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline?  Not to mention support for Iran in unpredictable ways.  The author concludes:

We could potentially find workarounds against most of these economic responses from Russia but, at a minimum, we should expect further spikes in inflation and pressures on supply chains across numerous critical industries

END

Let us also recall that that sanctions have generally been notable ineffective at toppling hostile governments or even getting them to change their ways.

Still, I suppose there is one bright spot if you want to call it that.  It avoids what I call the rolled-up newspaper problem (or maybe the "if you don't drop dead we'll kill you" problem) that Daniel Drezner writes extensively about.  Namely, how to you remove sanctions?  After all, if you impose sanctions to pressure a hostile country into changing its behavior, you have to be able to remove the sanctions if the behavior changes -- even if the country remains generally hostile otherwise.  

In a country with that much power to retaliate, I do not imagine that will be a problem.

The Inspector General's Report: In Sum

So, in short, the Inspector General's report found:

1. The FBI followed existing procedures in opening its investigation into the Trump campaign, although those procedures should probably be tightened to require DOJ approval;
2. The FBI followed existing procedures and appears to have acted appropriately in doing FBI file and open source investigation on campaign members, asking other government agencies for information, and opening an investigation on four members who seemed genuinely suspicious;
3. The FBI followed existing procedures in having confidential informants from outside of the Trump campaign talk Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, but those policies are incredible slack and should be tightened;
4. The FBI very properly did not insert any informants into the Trump campaign itself;
5. The FBI was not wrong to talk to Christopher Steele and investigate his leads, despite his working for Trump's political rivals (although it found serious problems in the nature of their relationship); however
6. The FBI seriously mismanaged the FISA application on Carter Page, using uncorroborated information from a dubious source and failing to include important exculpatory information. 

Reading between the lines two other things become apparent.  First the investigation came up dry.  It failed to find any evidence of a link between the Trump campaign and Russia.  This has led many Trump supporters to argue that the investigation should never have been launched.  But this ignores two things.  First, investigations do sometimes pursue false leads.  It is only in hindsight that we know which investigations will and will not turn up anything of importance..

Second, and relatedly, there wasn't much of an investigation.  Operation Crossfire Hurricane basically consisted of an open source search, a search of FBI files, inquiry to other agencies, several interviews by confidential informants, looking into the Steele Dossier, and a FISA warrant on Carter Page.  Really, that is rather thin.

Of course, the reason that Crossfire Hurricane was so skimpy was that it was operating under a serious handicap.  It had to conceal its existence.  That problem is endemic to all counter intelligence operations, but it was particularly acute in the case of Crossfire Hurricane because the target of the investigation was so high profile.  Actions like subpoenaing records might be doable in a lower profile case but would be detected what the target was a U.S. presidential campaign.  Crossfire Hurricane was therefore cut off from normal investigative techniques, like subpoenaing records and openly interviewing witnesses.  

Thus the story of the Trump investigation does not end with Crossfire Hurricane, but moves on to the Robert Mueller investigation.  The Robert Mueller investigation was able to use more open investigative techniques, but it, too, had a disadvantage.  The Mueller investigation was a criminal investigation.  That meant that it had to reach its conclusions based on evidence that would be admissible in court, and had to refrain from assumptions that, though reasonable, lacked an adequate evidentiary basis.  Although the Mueller Report did not find anything that could be charged as a criminal conspiracy, it did find disturbing happenings, in particular, that Paul Manafort was regularly sending polling data to a probably Russian spy, and that Michael Flynn was cruising the dark web for Hillary Clinton's deleted e-mails, unconcerned with the possibility that he might be talking to Russian spies.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, unhampered the the constraints of a criminal investigation, looking into these allegations in greater detail and did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, but found many decidedly disturbing event.  If this were a spy movie or mystery novel, the investigation would not have shifted from Crossfire Hurricane to Robert Mueller or the Senate Intelligence Committee.  Instead, the FBI, with the same personnel, would have been released from their constraints and completed the investigation.  

For me to complete the novel/movie, I should next read and post about the Senate Intelligence Committee report.  But I don't think I will do that just yet.  Why not?  Because right now Russia is gearing up for war on Ukraine.  We are hearing an endless drumbeat of reports that war could start any day.  In fact, at least some reports set the date as Wednesday, February 16.  And in Ukrainian time, it is already Wednesday, February 16, so the war could start, not just any day, but any hour.  A Russian invasion will not lead to WWIII because the US has ruled out military intervention.  But it will start an economic world war, with disastrous consequences for all parties.  Somehow everything else looks trivial by comparison.  So I do not expect to post on other topics until we see how things shake out.

The Inspector General's Report on the FISA Warrant

 

The bulk of the Inspector General's Report (pp. 121-34) deals with the FISA warrant against Carter Page, and finds numerous flaws in the process.  Even before receiving the Steele Report, agents had wanted to wiretap Page.*  To obtain a warrant, the FBI had to establish probably cause to believe that Page might be the agent of a foreign power.  Their interest was based on Page's past contacts with Russian intelligence agents and his visit to Moscow in July.  If there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, that seemed like the  most likely time for it to take place.  However, higher up's believed that the FBI was close, but not quite there (pp. 121-122).  The Steele report elevated the case for a wiretap from about 50/50 to what the FBI considered sufficient (p. 125).** 

The report found serious flaws in the application.  FISA applications should contain all relevant information, pro and con.  The application for Carter Page was based primarily ln the Steele report.  It included many of Steele's allegations about Page, including that he was serving as an intermediary between Manafort and Russia in a "well-developed conspiracy" regarding the hacks, that Russian officials offered him compromising materials on Hillary Clinton that they might be willing to share, that Russian officials discussed lifting sanctions with Page, and that Page was involved in Russia's release of DNC e-mails to Wikileaks (p. 130).  None of these allegations, it should be added, proved to be true, nor was there any corroboration at the time the application was made (p. 132)..  Meanwhile, the application left out significant exculpatory information (p. 127):

• Although the Steele Dossier portrayed Page as a liaison between Manafort and Russia, Page denied every having met or spoken to Paul Manafort.
• Page's denials of any knowledge of ties between Russia and Wikileaks or involvement in the Republican Party platform during a conversation with an informant (pp 146-147).
• Page's denials to the informant of meeting with sanctioned individuals in Moscow (p. 170).
• Papadopoulos' denials to an informant that the Trump campaign had any involvement with Russia or Wikileaks (pp. 166-167).  Such denials must be included, even if the FBI does not believe them (p. 168).
• Notice from the CIA (always referred to as "another government agency."  For some reason the Inspector General is extraordinarily coy about naming it) that Page was working for them in many of his Russia contacts.
• A serious exaggeration of Steele's reliability and importance

The FBI did also have some concerns about Steele being hired to do opposition research for the Democratic Party or the Clinton campaign (pp. 134-142).  At the same time, the FBI routinely uses biased or hostile sources in seeking warrants (friendly or neutral sources rarely have much dirt to offer) and considers this acceptable so long as the bias is include in application (p. 144).  That information was included in the Page warrant, in a footnote that was clearly visible in the main text (pp. 142-143). 

The FBI went on to apply for and receive three renewals of the application.  Although never expressly stated, the reason for the renewals appears to have been that they weren't getting any significant information, which was probably a sign to end the surveillance.  The first renewal application was not significantly different from the original application, except that it mentioned Steele had been fired for leaking information to Mother Jones.  It did not mention new information the FBI had received since the first application casting doubt on Steele's importance, reliability, and sources (pp. 202-204). 

The FBI applied for a second renewal in April, 2017 (p. 210).  By this time, they had spoken to Steele's primary sub-source and learned information from the sub-source that cast serious doubts on much of Steele's reporting (pp. 211-212).  Yet this was not included in the application (pp. 213, 215).  The same defects carried over into the FBI's third and final application (pp. 219-228).  

The Inspector General found that FBI procedures do allow the use of uncorroborated information in FISA applications, as was done with Page.  However, in those case, there has to be a thorough assessment of a source's reliability.  The FBI seriously failed in this requirement for Page (pp. 360-361).  It also found that many of the defects in the process were known to lower-level agents but did not make their way the top, so that higher ranking FBI officials approved the application unaware of its defects (p. 365).  This raises and obvious question -- how many of these problems are unique to this particular application and how many are chronic?  The report even found that one of the lawyers involved in the application tampered with an e-mail to state that Page was "not a source" for the CIA.  

If anyone is interested in the fine details of how the FBI makes FISA applications, I highly recommend the Inspector General's report.  For anyone else, the whole thing is deathly dull.  The report also contains interesting information for an outsider.  There are approximately 1,300 FISA applications submitted per year, and about 25-40 final applications per week (p. 133).

______________________________________

*A FISA wiretap of George Papadopoulos was also considered but rejected (p. 128).

**For what it is worth, General Counsel James Baker believed there was sufficient information for a FISA warrant even without the Steele report (pp. 134-135).  

The Inspector General's Report: Between Opening and FISA

 

Choosing individuals to investigate, preparing profiles, and seeking input from other government agencies are all appropriate as low-intrusive investigation techniques, but they only go so far.  One possibility was to subpoena relevant records, but the FBI decided against it (p. 355).  The FBI was constrained by a problem endemic to counter intelligence investigations -- how to keep the existence of the investigation secret to avoid tipping off the targets.  Subpoenas of this kind are public records.  Perhaps the FBI could get away with such a subpoena in a lower profile case, but anything this high profile, they were bound to be detected.  

Instead, the FBI opted to have confidential informants talk to the targets to see what they could learn.  These conversations were recorded.  Clearly this is a more intrusive technique that an open source search or seeking information from other government agencies, but it does not require a warrant or even approval of higher-ups, even in sensitive political matters.  Rather, it is treated as a judgment call by the investigation (pp. 307, 355-356).  

What is considered sensitive and does require extensive authorization and supervision, is infiltrating a confidential source into a political organization (p. 316, 403).  In other words, having a confidential informant inside the Trump campaign reporting on its activities. To do so would require (1) approval of the Special Agent in Charge, notice to the Sensitive Operations Review Committee, and departmental approval to record any conversations (p. 403). The members of the investigation were well aware of these restrictions and did not attempt to place any informants inside the campaign (pp. 311).  The FBI has a number of pre-existing informants in the Trump campaign but did not seek to activate any of them, (pp. 336-340, with heavy redactions).  The Inspector General also found no evidence that the FBI send any informants to the Trump campaign prior to opening the investigation (pp. 312-313).

The first outreach to an informant took place on August 11.  The plan was to talk about Russian interference in the election and possibly mention Papadopoulos (p. 314).  Much the the FBI agent's surprise, the informant had been offered a job in the Trump campaign, by Carter Page, no less and also mentioned Manafort and Flynn as people to watch (p. 315).  But the job offer raised problems, since the job offer with the Trump campaign raised all the restrictions and oversight needed to place an informant in a political operation (p. 316).  The source met with Carter Page on August 20, purportedly to discuss possible employment in the Trump campaign.  Page said that he had never met Manafort and that Manafort never responded to his e-mails.  (Keep in mind that this was nearly a month before the investigation received Christopher Steele's report that Page was Manafort's liaison with the Russians).  Page also complained about unfavorable press coverage (this was nearly a month after the Yahoo article accusing him of meeting with sanctioned Russians during his visit).  Page also hinted at an October Surprise but was evasive and seemed open to making use of Russian information if done very discreetly (pp 317-318).  

On September 1, 2016, the same source met, wearing a wire, with an unnamed high level campaign official who was not a target of the investigation, in hopes of learning more about Page and Papdopoulos.  The conversation yielded little to nothing of any significance.  The report expressed concern about the lack of safeguards to protect any sensitive information that might have been revealed (pp. 326-329).

The same source also met with George Papadopoulos on September 15.  In an attempt to recreate the conditions that led to Papadopoulos' indiscrete comments to the ambassador, the FBI arranged to have the meeting take place out of the country (at FBI expense), over drinks, for the nominal purpose of discussing business dealings (pp. 329-330).  Papadopoulos denied any coordination with either the Russians or Wikileaks and said that such things would be illegal (pp. 331-332).  The source and the FBI were suspicious of these responses, which seemed rehearsed (p. 332). Without reading or hearing these statements, it is hard to tell whether they were correct, or if motivated reasoning and confirmation bias were taking over.

The FBI also took advantage of its August 31, 2016 briefing of the Trump campaign to talk to Michael Flynn and get a sense of him (pp. 340-344).

All these conversations, it must be noted, took place before Crossfire Hurricane received the Steele Dossier on September 19.  Prior to receiving the report, the investigation had consisted of doing an open source search, seeking information from other government agencies, and having several taped conversations.  As the report comments, this had yielded some suspicious background on several campaign members, but nothing truly incuplatory (p. 101).  Presumably the investigators were starting to get frustrated and uncertain how to proceed when this apparent gold mine came along. Also predisposing the FBI to believe the Steele report was that it confirmed what they had already learned in their investigation of the hacks -- that Russian intelligence was responsible for the DNC hacks, that the Russian government was supporting the Trump campaign, and that the Russian government was seeking to sow division in the United States and the trans-Atlantic alliance (p. 101).

The FBI then began investigating the materials in the dossier.  They developed diagrams, charts, timelines and spreadsheets of the events identified, seeking sources and what could be verified (pp. 101-102).

Agents for Crossfire Hurricane inquired about Steele to his handler and received an endorsement that rather exaggerated his importance and reliability (p. 102).  By the time the FBI met with Steele in October, he had already discussed his findings with other government officials (Bruce Ohr of the Justice Department) and discussed the matter with the press.  All outlets except Yahoo News had deemed the matter too unverified to publish, but well before the meeting Yahoo News had run a story alleging that Carter Page met with a sanctioned individual in Russia (pp. 104-105). While the FBI was uncertain whether Steele was directly responsible for the Yahoo story, it had little doubt that his research was the ultimate source (pp. 106-107). At their October meeting, the FBI agreed to employ Steele to search for additional intelligence on named individuals, physical evidence of collaboration, and information on his sub-sources (pp. 109-110).  Steele was disappointed at this request, wanting to focus on Trump, but he did identify some of his sources.  He also declined to identify who he was working for (pp. 110-111).  There was also evidence from the start that his information might not be reliable. The Russian who Steele identified as Page's possible handler was one that Page had given the CIA information about (p. 111).  

The FBI also told Steele to report to the FBI only (p. 112).  Steele, needless to say, did not comply.  The FBI fired him as a source after he leaked the investigation to Mother Jones on October 31, 2016 (pp. 172-175).  Most of the FBI's investigation into either Steele's reliability and his reporting took place after he was fired, and even after the election.  Further investigation into Steele revealed him not to be as reliable or as important as he had claimed (pp. 182-186).  It was not until early 2017 that the FBI was able to talk to Steele's primary sub-source (p. 186).  The sub-source's comments decidedly tended to weaken and undermine the dossier.  For instance, the sub-source could not the urinating on the bed incident at the Ritz Carlton in 2013 and denied any knowledge of Carter Page being offered a bribe when he visited Russia in July, 2016 (p.. 187).  The sub-source also made clear that the information being passed on consisted of rumors by people who did not have first-hand information, and that Steele's reports made it all sound more definite that it really was (p. 188) and that much of what was reported as fact was actually analysis or supposition (p. 190).  

he Inspector General found that the use of informants met with existing FBI policy, which made the matter purely discretionary, so long as the FBI did not place informants within the campaign itself.  The report found (appropriately, I think) that there needed to be more controls over the use of informants, and that the matter should not be left solely to the discretion of the investigating officer.  In particular, the report recommended policies to protect against the incidental collection of politically sensitive information, and for assessments to determine whether the potential impact on constitutionally protected activity outweighs the potential investigative benefit (p. 400).  (Someone within the Trump campaign appears to have approached the FBI and provided them with information, and that the Inspector General has concerns about that.  However, the section is so heavily redacted that it is not possible to tell what happened, p. 402).  As stated before, the report did not find the use of any informants inside the Trump campaign.  Presumably this means that the strict rules in such cases were effective (pp. 403-404).  The report also expressed misgivings about using briefing to gain information on Michael Flynn, mostly on the grounds that it could undermine the trust necessary in such briefings, (pp. 407-409).  While not prepared to call for an absolute ban, the report recommended requiring the approval of senior leaders (p. 409).

With respect to Steele, the Inspector General found that the FBI was not required to ignore his work simply because it was opposition research , but was required to critically examine the information taking that into account (p. 383).  Initially the FBI was unable to verify Steele's information, and after talking to his sub-source, found it to be questionable (pp. 383-384).  The report goes on to say that these problems should have been included in the FISA application (pp. 384-385).

Next up: The FISA warrant.

Inspector General's Report -- Opening the Investigation

So, what is actually in the Inspector General's Report?  First of all, it is tediously long (over 400 pages) and redundant.  It also really needs a glossary to allow the reader to keep track of the alphabet soup of acronyms.  There is also a large cast of characters, whose exact role in the FBI and the investigation can sometimes be confusing.  The purpose of the report is to determine whether the FBI followed accepted policies and procedures, and also to make recommendations for improvements.  

Finally, and frustratingly, the report is not in strict chronological order, or even in order of escalation. It begins, reasonably enough, with the opening of the investigation and its decision to investigate four members of the Trump campaign.  It then goes on to discuss the FBI's meeting Christopher Steele, its interviews with some of his sources, and its application for a FISA warrant against Carter Page.  The report has many serious criticisms of the application for a FISA warrant and three renewals.  Only after nearly 200 pages discussing warrant and serious defects in the process does the report discuss the FBI sending confidential informants to talk to members of the campaign, even though the confidential informants happened first and were a lower step of escalation.  (I do not understand the reason for this sequence).

 The decision to begin with the opening of the investigation is certainly reasonable, but , interestingly, it is not the first chronological event discussed in the report.  Trump defenders frequently accuse the FBI with beginning the investigation (known as "Operation Crossfire Hurricane") with the Steele Dossier, which is at best a collection of third and fourth hand rumors and at worst an outright fraud.  Trump critics say the investigation began when the Australian ambassador to the United Kingdom reported that George Papadopoulos had said he had spoken to Maltese professor and presumed Russian asset Joseph Mifsud, who said that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, in to form of "thousands of e-mails."  Trump defenders have also argued that Mifsud was an FBI informant who made that comment to Papadopoulos, trusting that he would pass it on and give the FBI an excuse to investigate.

The report begins (p. 49) with some background.  Papadopoulos made his careless remarks to the Australian ambassador in May, 2016.  The ambassador does not appear to have considered them significant at the time. The Russian hacks of the DNC server became known in June, 2016. Wikileaks started publishing DNC e-mails on July 22, 2016.  On July 28, 2016, the ambassador began to think these remarks were more important that he had realized and reported them to the FBI.  The FBI opened its investigation on July 31, 2016 (p. 50).  The Inspector General interviews of witnesses and reviews of FBI documents confirmed this sequence of events and did not turn up evidence that anything else started the investigation (pp. 56, 346).  A thorough search of FBI files also failed to turn up any evidence that Mifsud was ever an FBI informant (pp. 312-313).  

No contact between Crossfire Hurricane and Steele had taken place at this time.  However, that was not for any lack of effort on Steele's part.  Steele appears to have reached out the the FBI in early July and provided an agent with one of his reports on July 5, 2016 (p. 95).  He appears to have been well aware that he was hired by associates of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign (p. 96).  Steele provided another report on July 19, which his handler passed up the chain of command to the New York Field Office (NYFO) (p. 98).  The NYFO appears to have informed Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who passed the tip on to Crossfire Hurricane in August 25, 2016 (p. 99).  Crossfire Hurricane first received Steele's reports on September 19, 2016 (p. 100) and began investigating (p. 101). Crossfire Hurricane personnel made inquiries about Steele on September 23 and held a telephone conference about setting up a meeting on September 27 (p. 103).  The first in-person meeting took place in early October (p. 18).  In short, Steele appears to have been reaching out to the FBI before the investigation began, but his research only became part of the investigation about a month after it opened, and Crossfire Hurricane agents did not meet with Steele until over two months after beginning the investigation.  Significantly, then Steele contacted the FBI after the DNC hack became public, but before Wikileaks published DNC e-mails. The first contacts between also took place after the July 23, 2016 Yahoo News publication sourced to a Steele leak (more on that later).

So if Operation Crossfire Hurricane did not begin with an investigation of the Steele Dossier, how did it begin?  Upon receiving a tip from the Australian ambassador, the FBI decided to open an investigation, and not to notify the Trump campaign, lest it change its presumed contact with Russian intelligence (p. 55).  The standard to launch such an investigation is low -- no more than an "articulable factual basis" to believe that there is a threat to national security (pp. 56-57). A Sensitive Investigative Matter (as this obviously was) requires special consideration about the seriousness of the danger and special care to use the least intrusive method.  In addition, the FBI Office of General Counsel must review the investigation, the Section Chief must approve it, and the National Security Division must be notified (pp. 21-22).  

The FBI's first action was to undertake an open source and FBI database search on members of the Trump campaign to see which were mostly likely to be points of contact with Russian intelligence (p. 59).  They found four likely suspects to make targets of investigation.  Carter Page (a fairly low level foreign policy advisor) had extensive business ties to Russia, had traveled to Russia in July, and was the subject of an ongoing counterintelligence investigation by the FBI in New York.  Paul Manafort, the campaign manager, had been an advisor to and lobbyist for the pro-Russian party in Ukraine.  Papadopoulos was flagged for the communications that started the investigation.  Michael Flynn was flagged for his ties to Russian entities and for appearing on Russia Today (p.60). The individual investigations were apparently opened on August 10, 2016 (p. 78)  The next step was to draw up profiles based in materials in FBI records, and to ask other government agencies for materials to contribute to the profiles (p. 78).   

Page was considered the most likely point of contact because of his pre-existing contacts with Russian intelligence and because he was already under investigation for them (pp. 61-62).  However, the FBI received information from "another U.S. government agency" that Page had worked for it from 2008 to 2013 (p. 79).  In other words, Page worked for the CIA, and his contacts with Russian intelligence agents may have been in order to spy on them.  For some reason, the report is extremely cagey about naming the agency involved.  This fact should have been taken into account in further investigations, but was not.  

The Inspector General concluded that the decision to open an investigation, to conduct open source and internal files investigation, and choose these four particular targets met the low standard of opening an investigation -- an "articulable factual basis." (pp. 347-354, 410), that the investigation was opened for an "authorized purpose" (p. 347), and that the use of open sources and FBI internal materials was appropriate as as  "less intrusive technique" (p. 355).  It found no evidence of improper political motivation.  Although texts exchanged between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page showed improper political bias.  However, it found that Page had no role in he decision to open the investigation and that, while Strzok did have such a role, others were also involved in the decision, and that he did not act unilaterally (pp. 348-349).  They found no evidence of improper political motivation among any of the other participants in the decision to open the investigation (pp. 349-350).

I will add that in my own opinion, the standard for an open source investigation probably does not need to be very high. Open source investigation, after all, is just investigative journalism, and anyone can do it.  And internal FBI records, though not publicly accessible, are freely accessible to the FBI. At the same time, there has to be some sort of threshold.  Investigative journalism is a labor intensive process, and FBI time and effort is a limited resource.  Besides, so much information is public now that a thorough-going investigation, even one limited to open sources, can be quite intrusive.

The report found that all necessary requirement for such a sensitive investigation were met (p. 353). At the same time, the report expressed concern that the FBI had unilateral authority to make such decisions in matters as sensitive as a Presidential campaign.  It proposed that high level Justice Department approval should be required (pp.353-354, 411).  I am not convinced.  It would not reassure me to know that the Jeff Sessions or William Barr Justice Department approved an investigation into a Democratic candidate for President, and I doubt that Republicans would be reassured that an investigation was approved by the Eric Holder or Merrick Garland Justice Department.  At the same time, it would over burden federal courts to require a warrant for matters of low intrusiveness.  Maybe there should be a quasi-judicial section of the Justice Department with authority to grant internal authorization for politically sensitive investigations, perhaps with a "devil's advocate" lawyer to make arguments against the authorization.

Next up:  Between opening and FISA.

The Crossfire Hurricane Inspector General's Report Comes Across Like a Spy Movie

Wow!  It has been over a year since I promised a report on the Inspector General's Report on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation.  Granted, so much has happened since then it seems like something impossibly long ago that no one cares about anymore.  But I still want to post about the report for a most implausible reason.

Dense and difficult as the reading was, I always had the feeling that I had stepped into a spy movie or a mystery novel.  I kept wondering how your could make this into a spy movie or mystery novel.

It had all the elements -- false leads, red herrings, a surprise twist in the outcome, even a love story.  

And yes, I know that real life is not a mystery novel or spy movie.  The most suspicious person usually really is guilty.  The harmless looking person in the background usually is harmless and only tangentially involved.  But on the other hand, real life investigators really do pursue false leads and stumble into blind alleys sometimes.  

Operation Crossfire Hurricane, as the investigation was known, is an example of how such things play out in real life.  The FBI suspected a regular channel of communications between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, after learning that a presumed Russian agent had approached George Papadopoulus. The FBI identified four suspects who might be conduits -- Papadopoulus, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn.  While it investigated all four, the FBI quickly singled out Page as the most likely contact.  It was a reasonable supposition.  Page had had frequent contacts with Russian intelligence operatives, had been interviewed by the FBI for his contacts with Russian intelligence agents in 2013, and was under an unrelated counterintelligence investigation at the time Operation Crossfire Hurricane opened.*  In fact, he was secretly working for the CIA as a sort of double agent trying to gain intelligence on these Russian agents.  (In the murky world of espionage, it is not always clear who is spying on who).  

In a spy movie or mystery novel, this fact would have been dramatically revealed just as the FBI thought it was closing in for the kill and cut off this promising line of investigation.  In fact, the lower level agents appear to have found out and not bothered to pass this information on when applying for a warrant to wiretap Page.  Their numerous failings in applying for the wiretap form the bulk of the report.  The FBI failed to turn up anything damaging on Page, despite the warrant and three renewals.  

In the end, of course, the FBI ended up dropping the investigation and the thread was taken up Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee.  These further investigations would make clear that there was no regular channel of communications between the Trump campaign and Russian Intelligence -- except that there was.  The Trump campaign was not receiving reports from the Russians or coordinating strategies with them.**  However campaign manager Paul Manafort was running an apparently rogue operation in which he regularly passed polling data to presumed Russian intelligence operative.  What use the operative made of the polling data is unknown.  

Obviously, if this had been a spy movie/mystery novel the investigation would not have changed hands.  The FBI agents who started the investigation would finish it.  What about discovering that what was going on was much less involved and sinister than it appeared at first sight?  This is a permissible gambit, going back at least to Jorge Luis Borges' 1942 short story Death and the Compass, in which a seeming pattern of murders pointing to some bizarre occult practice turns out to have been a ruse to lure in the detective for the kill.  Umberto Ecco copies the technique in his novel Name of the Rose, in which a series of murders at a monastery appear to follow the signs from the Book of Revelations, but it turns out that the monks were merely reading from a poisoned book and the pattern was superimposed by the viewers.***  And Dan Brown is infamous for the technique.

Of course, in your classic spy or mystery story, an even more classic ploy would be to have the whole Russian hack turn out to be a red herring and the DNC e-mails were really stolen by Seth Rich. Except that is not what happened.  The Russians really did hack the DNC.   So a classic spy/mystery story would have to take some liberties with events to make Seth Rich a credible red herring.  What actually happened (for anyone who has forgotten) is that the DNC realized they had been hacked and called a private security firm to investigate.  The firm traced the hack to Russian Intelligence.  The DNC notified the FBI and publicized the hack. The e-mails first appeared in Wikileaks over a month later.

In a mystery/spy story, no one would have been aware of the hack until the e-mails appeared in Wikileaks.  The FBI would then begin an investigation that initially centered on Seth Rich and became especially intense when he was murdered.  But further investigation would clear him and reveal that the true hacker was Russian Intelligence -- true in the finding, false in the sequence.  After realizing they were dealing with the Russians, the FBI would then receive a tip suggesting that the Russians had approached the Trump campaign with this information (true) and begin the investigation.  

The Steele Dossier would also figure in as another red herring.  I am not sure how the mystery/spy story would handle the Peter Strozk/Lisa Page romance (both were married to someone else; the romance ultimately never went anywhere), but what would a novel be without a love story?

Next up:  What the Inspector General's report actually said.

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*It should go without saying, but it was not normal for a presidential candidate to employ such a person as a foreign advisor.
**Although Roger Stone, close to the campaign but not a member, was receiving information from Wikileaks and passing it on to the campaign.

***Ecco paid tribute to Borges and his short story by naming the villain Jorge of Burgos.