The very day in January 2017 that then-FBI Director James Comey signed a FISA surveillance warrant application declaring content from Christopher Steele’s dossier had been “verified,” he wrote President Obama’s outgoing intelligence community chief with a very different assessment of the British spy’s intelligence on Russia collusion, a newly released memo shows.
Newly declassified FBI memos provide startling new details that undercut the frenzied 2017 effort to investigate Donald Trump for obstruction, revealing the FBI knew Director James Comey’s firing had been conceived by Justice Department leadership long before the president pulled the trigger during a key moment in the Russia probe.
FBI agents opened an investigation in late 2014 into a foreign power’s effort to curry influence with Hillary Clinton’s prospective presidential campaign through donations, but the bureau’s leadership slow-walked a surveillance warrant and instead arranged for the candidate to get a defensive briefing, newly declassified memos show.
Dossier author Christopher Steele admitted to the FBI he leaked the Russia collusion story during the height of the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton overcome her lingering email scandal and because he believed Donald Trump’s election would be bad for U.S. relations with his home country of Britain, according to documents declassified by the president in his final full day in office.
The top Justice Department official in early 2017 overseeing the FBI’s Russia probe testified he was briefed as many as six times on its status and was told there was no evidence of Trump campaign collusion, a newly released transcript shows.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified two documents showing President Obama’s CIA feared in summer 2016 that Hillary Clinton was “stirring up” a false Russia collusion narrative to “vilify” Donald Trump and distract from her own controversies heading into the election.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said intellectual property theft campaigns against the United States by the Chinese government, including economic espionage aimed at U.S. government-funded research, has the “perverse effect” of U.S. taxpayers funding China’s rise.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said he has seen “additional” documents that are pertinent to U.S. Attorney John Durham’s criminal inquiry into the Russia investigation.
Special Attorney John H. Durham, who is investigating the FBI’s 2016-17 spying operation against the Trump campaign, announced that former top FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, 38, pleaded guilty today to altering a document that was then used to obtain a secret FISA application and warrant to spy on a person working for the Trump campaign.
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chair Ron Johnson appeared to imply Wednesday that Republican committee colleagues are preventing him from subpoenaing FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, and other Obama administration officials who investigated allegations of collusion between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, Politico reports. Johnson’s apparent implication during a radio interview was made even though his committee has given him unilateral authority to issue the subpoenas.
Former FBI Director James Comey suggested to then-President Barack Obama in a January 2017 meeting that the National Security Council [NSC] might not want to pass “sensitive information related to Russia” to then-incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, according to a newly declassified email that Flynn’s predecessor sent herself on Inauguration Day.
Explosive new internal FBI documents unsealed Wednesday show that top bureau officials discussed their motivations for interviewing then-national security adviser Michael Flynn in the White House in January 2017 — and openly questioned if their “goal” was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”
Attorney General Bill Barr, in an interview with Fox News, defended the independence and integrity of the politically contentious probe being led by U.S. Attorney John Durham into the handling of the Russia investigation – while taking a swipe at James Comey’s past leadership of the FBI.
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, speaking out in a new book and TV interview, detailed the central role he played in the bureau’s Russia probe and the eventual appointment of a special counsel — while reportedly describing Justice Department meetings where officials discussed ousting President Trump.
President Trump on Monday ordered the Justice Department and FBI to immediately declassify key documents related to the FBI’s investigation on Russian actions during the 2016 presidential election — including text messages from former FBI Director James Comey and other top officials.
The Justice Department’s internal watchdog has concluded that James Comey defied authority at times during his tenure as FBI director, according to sources familiar with a draft report on the matter.
Former FBI Director James Comey sparred with Fox News’ Bret Baier in a heated interview Thursday over whether his decision last year to share the contents of a memo detailing his conversations with President Trump constituted a ‘leak.’
Emails reviewed by Fox News from February 2016 suggest the FBI and DOJ worked together to craft a response to a key development in the Hillary Clinton email investigation, amid newly raised Republican concerns about a ‘concerning level of coordination’ between the two agencies during the probe.
On Thursday, contemporaneous memos written by then-FBI director James Comey regarding meetings with President Trump were revealed to Congress…and within minutes, were leaked to the media. There wasn’t much in the memos we hadn’t already heard from Comey, of course.
A retired FBI official who supervised the bureau’s warrantless phone surveillance program said then-Director James Comey took no action in response to his warnings about the inefficiencies of the program back in 2014.