By Eric Felton

Now that the Russia collusion allegations have evaporated, the long knives are out and President Trumpâ€™s antagonists are watching their backs. They have moved from accusing him of treason to pushing revisionist narratives that try to shift the blame for the debunked probe onto others.

This effort is expected to accelerate following Trumpâ€™sÂ decision ThursdayÂ to empower Attorney General William Barr to declassify CIA, Pentagon, and Director of National Intelligence documents as necessary to access â€œinformation or intelligence that relates to the attorney generalâ€™s reviewâ€ of the Russia probe.

In other words, heâ€™s gaining the authority needed to investigate the investigators.

CIA sources immediatelyÂ objected in the New York TimesÂ that assetsâ€™ lives would be at risk, stunting Langleyâ€™s ability to recruit. Perhaps. But the argument is a bit shopworn, raising the question whether intelligence managers are looking to protect their agents and sources, or aiming to protect themselves.

There are a growing number of indicators that the leading players in the 2016 election drama are turning on one another, making a mad dash for the lifeboats to escape being dragged under with the political Titanic that is Christopher Steele and his dossier. These are many of the same people who had been eager to exploit the dossier, that collection of memos paid for by the Clinton campaign and supposedly sourced from Russia. Once treated like the Rosetta stone of collusion, the Steele documents now seem even to Trump antagonists more like theÂ Howard Hughes diaries.

A “former CIA officialâ€ has told Fox News that two of Trumpâ€™s most high profile accusers â€“ former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Director of the CIA John Brennan â€“ didnâ€™t want anything to do with Steeleâ€™s opus. It was former FBI Director James Comey, the source said, who was pushing to use the dossier in the official Intelligence Community Assessment, issued in the final days of the Obama administration. Having failed at that, thanks to Clapper and Brennanâ€™s diligence (or so the story goes), Comey went rogue and confronted President-elect Trump with the salacious highlights produced by Steele.

Even the peripheral players are doing their best to shift blame. Former FBI General Counsel James Baker â€“ who is under criminal investigation for leaks â€“ Â recently went on theÂ Skullduggery podcastÂ to assert thatÂ he and other bureau officials wereÂ â€œquite worriedâ€Â that Â Comeyâ€™s meeting with Trump would look like a page out of J. Edgar Hooverâ€™s playbook â€“ invokingÂ the legendary FBI director who stockpiled damaging information to blackmail politicians. Would Comey be wrong to interpret Bakerâ€™s comments as an offer to testify against his former boss in exchange for a deal on the leaks investigation?

In September of 2015, Lynch and Comey were preparing to testify on Capitol Hill and expected to be asked about the Hillary Clinton email probe â€” code-named the Midyear Exam â€” which at that point had not been officially acknowledged. â€œI wanted to know if she [Lynch] would authorize us to confirm we had an investigation,â€ Comey told lawmakers. â€œAnd she said yes, but don’t call it that; call it a ‘matter.’ And I said why would I do that? And [Lynch] said just call it a â€˜matter.â€™â€ Comey says he reluctantly went along with Lynchâ€™s demand, even though it gave him â€œa queasy feeling.â€ He worried â€œthat the attorney general was looking to align the way we talked about our work with the way a political campaign was describing the same activity, which was inaccurate.â€

Lynch pushed back against the notion she had twisted Comeyâ€™s arm. In April 2018 she told NBCâ€™s Lester Holt that she didnâ€™t remember the meeting the way Comey described it, and that the FBI director had raised no objections.

But now that the questions about officialsâ€™ behavior regarding the 2016 candidates has become a fraught topic, those officials are taking stronger stands to defend themselves. Comey continues to leave little wiggle room in his portrayal of the conversation with Lynch. In a December 2018 closed-door congressional interview, Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) asked him to confirm â€œthe fact that the attorney general had asked you to refer to this investigation as a matter, correct?â€

â€œThat is correct.â€ Comey said.

Not so, says Lynch. On Dec. 19, 2018, she appeared before a closed-door session of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. She was being questioned by Republican staff attorney Zach Somers. He asked â€œwhether you ever instructed Director Comey to call the Midyear Exam investigation a matter?â€ She said his testimony was the first she had any indication â€œthat he had that impression of our conversation.â€

That answer was a little ambiguous, so Somers asked Lynch directly: â€œSo you do not believe you ever instructed him to call it a matter?â€

â€œI did not,â€ said Lynch. â€œI have never instructed a witness as to what to say specifically. Never have, never will.â€ Under penalty of lying to Congress, the former AG declared, â€œI didn’t direct anyone to use specific phraseology.â€

Before leaping to the conclusion that Lynch is calling Comey a liar, we need to keep reading the transcript of Lynchâ€™s testimony, which ends up being far less definitive than it first appears. As is so often the case with lawyersâ€™ lawlerly responses, the assertion turns on specific words. Lynch said she didnâ€™t â€œinstructâ€ or â€œdirectâ€ anyone to use any â€œspecificâ€ language. Instead, she testified, she had told Comey that she personally referred to the Hillary affair as a â€œmatterâ€ or â€œissueâ€ and â€œthat was the suggestion that I made to him.â€

Could it be this is the shape of investigations â€” sorry,Â mattersÂ â€” to come? The spectacle of former power players parsing verbs at one another? It may seem a sound defensive strategy now, but it will grow harder to craft phraseology subtle enough to slip out of trouble. Legalistic sparring becomes increasingly difficult as the number of those being put under oath proliferates, and as the number of investigations mount. The game theory concept known as theÂ â€œPrisonerâ€™s dilemmaâ€Â is confounding enough when there are two players having to figure out whether to trust one another or sell each other out. Make it multi-person, game theorists point out, and the difficulty for the players grows exponentially.

Making the game even more difficult is how much of the play is being done under cover. When so much of the frenzied blame-shifting is right out in the open, who knows how muchÂ whet workwith the long knives is going on in the shadows? â€œIf Brennan and Comey and Clapper are doing this publicly,â€ one Senate staffer says, private-sector dossier-peddlers â€œ[Sidney] Blumenthal, [Cody] ShearerÂ andÂ [Glenn] SimpsonÂ are doing it privately.â€

Thereâ€™s no overstating institutional animosities and how likely they are to affect efforts to find out the full story of what happened in the 2016 election. The Department of Justice, the FBI, the State Department and various intelligence agencies are supposed to cooperate, working together to amplify their efforts through coordination. Instead, they often end up at odds, competing for the praise and resources that come with successes and laying off on others the blame that attends mistakes and failures.

â€œThe FBI and DoJ are ruthless to each other, petty to one another,â€ one congressional staffer marvels.

FBI investigator Peter Strzok provides a vivid example of the attitudes at play. In texts to his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, he makes declarations such as â€œI hate DoJ.â€ Half an hour later he sends another text that includes â€œAnd I hate DoJ.â€ Elsewhere in the texts, the people of â€œmain justiceâ€ are called â€œpolitical dicks.â€ In the same spirit Strzok declares â€œDoJ are putzes, man.â€ Later he tells Page, â€œDonâ€™t trust DoJâ€ and declares, â€œGod I hate them.â€ Page describes DoJ as the â€œno brigade.â€ She writes, â€œI just feel like throttling DOJ.â€

Connoisseurs of the knife fights between Justice and the bureau keep an eye out not only for what gets reported in the press, but where it gets reported. â€œThe Department of Justice has good relations with, and tends to leak to, the Washington Post,â€ says a longtime Capitol Hill staffer. â€œThe FBI leaks to the New York Times.â€

He points to the competing narratives about then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosensteinâ€™s supposed offer to wear a wire and record conversations with the president. The story broke in the New York Times last September and portrayed then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe as the level-headed professional pushing back against Rosensteinâ€™s fevered fantasies, which included not only the suggestion of secretly recording Trump, but the idea of invoking the 25th Amendment to have him removed from office. â€œThe extreme suggestions show Mr. Rosensteinâ€™s state of mind in the disorienting days that followed Mr. Comeyâ€™s dismissal,â€ the Times wrote. â€œMr. Rosenstein appeared conflicted, regretful and emotional, according to people who spoke with him at the time.â€ In other words, if there were dubious decisions being made by federal law enforcement officials, it wasnâ€™t just Rosensteinâ€™s fault, according to the Times; it was because the deputy AG was losing his marbles.

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The Times story was followed shortly thereafter by a Washington Post take on the same events, a version significantly more friendly to Rosenstein. According to â€œattendees at the meeting,â€ it was McCabe who was pushing boundaries, advocating an â€œinvestigation into the president,â€ the Post wrote. In this account, â€œRosenstein responded [to McCabe] with what one person described as a sarcastic comment along the line of: â€˜What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?â€™â€ The Post story attributed to a â€œJustice Department official who met frequently with both McCabe and Rosensteinâ€ that â€œin the months that followed, Rosenstein never broached either subject â€” the 25th Amendment or a possible wiretap involving the president.â€

You donâ€™t have to be a champion contestant on that peculiar Washington game show — “Guess the Source!” — to have a sense of which side of the street was providing what information to which newspaper.

Given the Times’s sources in and around the FBI, there is particular significance when the Times writes a revisionist history of the bureauâ€™s activities involving the 2016 election. At the end of 2017 the paper had done its best to write the dossier out of the creation myth of the Russia investigation. The Times had maintained, in anÂ April 2017 article, that it was Carter Pageâ€™s ill-advised commencement speech in Moscow in the summer of 2016 that had sparked the FBIâ€™s concerns the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia. This line came from the dossier, which had alleged that Page had secret meetings with billionaire oligarchs during his Moscow stay. But after the dossier started to be exposed as the partisan document it was, a new reason emerged to justify the launching of a counterintelligence probe into team Trump â€” that George Papadopoulos had supposedly mentioned, over drinks with an Australian diplomat, that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

ThatÂ alternate origin storyÂ remained largely unchanged until early this month, when the Times rewrote its narrative, clearly with the help of FBI sources. TheÂ new narrativeÂ included the revelation that the bureau had sent a â€œgovernment investigatorâ€ to London under the false name â€œAzra Turk.â€ Her undercover mission was to flirt with Papadopoulos and pump him for information about Trump and the Russians. The Times helpfully (from the FBIâ€™s point of view) portrayed this as evidence of the â€œlevel of alarmâ€ investigators had about Trump and Russia.





The article was a classic example of a fundamental Washington PR technique, that of â€œgetting ahead of the story.â€ Knowing the Azra Turk business is being looked over by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, sources in, or formerly of, the bureau went to friendly reporters and fed them information that could put the events in the least unflattering light possible. Note, however, that the bureau players â€” who normally wring their hands about the national security damage done by the release of unredacted information â€” arenâ€™t above leaking details of covert ops if thatâ€™s what it takes to soften a blow.

As things unravel further, theyâ€™re likely to get nastier. In part thatâ€™s because the FBI doesnâ€™t just hate the Department of Justice. If the Page-Strzok texts are any indication, the bureau doesnâ€™t much like the State Department either. â€œDOJ is a wild pain in the ass,â€ Strzok texts Page. â€œNot as bad as State, but still.â€ Faced with sending some documents about the Hillary email investigation to Foggy Bottom, Page texts, â€œIâ€™m not giving State an advance warning. F them.â€ Strzok responds, â€œAnd yes, totally. F State. No heads up.â€

They not only sneered at their colleagues across the street (Justice and the FBI are housed on opposite sides of Pennsylvania Avenue), their feelings toward their bureau co-workers ranged from diffidence to detestation.

Consider the infamous text from Strzok to Page: â€œJust went to a southern Virginia Wal-Mart,â€ Strzok wrote. â€œI could SMELL the Trump support.â€

Lost in the noisy outrage over the Trumpy odors insult has been Pageâ€™s reply: â€œYep, out to lunch with Sallyâ€ Moyer, Page texted. â€œWe both hate everyone and everything.â€

â€œDo you hate everyone and everything?â€ Republican staff attorney Arthur Baker asked Moyer â€” a unit chief in the FBIâ€™s Office of General Counsel. The question came in an October 2018 closed-door interview with the House Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight.

â€œSome days,â€ Moyer deadpanned.

The questioner was nonplussed: â€œBut you don’t hate everyone and everything all the time?â€

â€œNot all the time, no.â€

Moyer may have been indulging in a little gallows humor, but aggravation with the job and co-workers at the FBI â€” hate for everyone and everything all the time â€” seems to be commonplace in the bureau. Page calls various colleagues everything from â€œan ASTOUNDING doucheâ€ to â€œa petulant baby.â€

Given the paramount heights to which both Strzok and Page had risen within the FBI, itâ€™s unlikely they were outliers among the bureauâ€™s management class. Their casual contempt for co-workers and for the departments of Justice and State canâ€™t be attitudes far out of step with those of their seventh-floor colleagues. Sticking it to State and Justice and even (perhaps especially) the fellow down the hall: If that was the culture of the FBIâ€™s leadership when the investigators were riding high and enjoying the power that came from collaborating with State and Justice in the pursuit of a president, just imagine how they are likely to behave toward one another now that they have become the pursued rather than the pursuers.

Even in the best of times, departments and agencies such as Justice, State and the FBI find themselves in back-stabbing bureaucratic battles of all against all. Imagine how those Hobbesian bureaucrats, whether current or former, are likely to behave when the outcomes being fought over have profoundly personal ramifications. One recalls theÂ moment in â€œItâ€™s a Wonderful Lifeâ€when the upstanding George Bailey (James Stewart) is sinking in frantic desperation: â€œDo you realize what this means?!â€ he shouts at doddering Uncle Billy, whoâ€™s lost the bank deposit. â€œIt means bankruptcy and scandal and prison. Thatâ€™s what it means.â€ With shocking savagery, Bailey throws the old man down in his chair and declares, â€œOne of us is going to jail, and itâ€™s not going to be me!”

Â© RealClearInvestigations.com Used with permission.

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