By Brian Cates
There is a popular new narrative in both the Left and Right news media that when Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz has his latest report publicly released on December 9, it will lead to a huge letdown.
It is being claimed that Horowitz's year and a half long deep dive into issues surrounding FISA warrants granted to the FBI targeting the Trump presidential campaign during the 2016 election – and continuing into the Trump administration itself through several renewals of that warrant – will lead to no criminal investigations and certainly not any criminal prosecutions.
It is confidently asserted that once again, the so called “Deep State” is about to demonstrate to the entire country how powerful it is, as we get to watch all the key SpyGate plotters walk away without any consequences.
Those pushing this popular new narrative are, quite bluntly, absolutely wrong.
So blinded by their own narrative are many of these news media figures and commentators that they can't even see what is happening right out in the open, in front of their eyes.
The Declassification of Key SpyGate Evidence Has Already Begun
Because many people have an unrealistic expectation of how Attorney General William Barr would go about declassifying the remaining SpyGate evidence and starting investigations based upon that newly declassified evidence, they don’t realize he’s already quietly doing it.
There is this expectation fixed in people's minds that there will be some sort of official announcement, like a press conference or something, where Barr will hold up a binder full of documents and declare he's just now done the long anticipated declassification of all the remaining classified SpyGate documents.
But that is not how Barr has been using the declassification powers that President Trump delegated to him back in May of this year. Instead of declassifying key documents all at once, dramatically, Barr has been doing it quietly one key document at a time.
That's right. Barr has already been declassifying and releasing some of the key SpyGate evidence collected by IG Horowitz to at least one US Attorney we know of; John Durham. It is why we keep seeing announcements that Durham is expanding his criminal investigation into the origins of the RussiaGate hoax. In just the past week it was announced that Durham was now opening up two new fronts in his criminal probe:
- A criminal case against a former FBI lawyer who was discovered to have altered a key FISA document and
- An investigation into suspicious contracts out of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment [ONA] being awarded to key SpyGate informant Stefan Halper
Barr has also taken action to give very recently declassified SpyGate evidence to the lawyers of the target of a malicious prosecution by the Mueller Special Counsel as it worked in concert with the SpyGate plotters. Sidney Powell, who is lead defense counsel for Lt. General Michael Flynn, revealed this newly declassified SpyGate evidence that had long been held back by the DOJ in her explosive court filing back on November 4.
The evidence consists of text messages and emails exchanged between former FBI officials Peter Strzok & Lisa Page in which they not only discuss tampering with the FD-302 form from the Flynn interview, they are also seen talking about how they can influence the judge who was presiding over Flynn's case.
The Strzok/Page texts had been previously released but in a very heavily redacted form. Quietly, without fanfare or any public announcement, suddenly Flynn's defense counsel was in possession of not only the unredacted text messages, but also may have been a draft section of Horowitz's FISA report.
This is because Powell's court filing contains an eye-opening three page exhibit in which Lisa Page is being interviewed by OIG investigators who ask her if she had made any material changes to the Flynn 302 form. When she denies having made any edits to the only official record of the Flynn interview, upon which the charge of perjury against him was founded, the OIG investigators then confronted Page with her own text messages exchanged with Peter Stzok, causing her to immediately change her story and admit she had edited the form.
Recall that IG Horowitz first surfaced to hand off the first collection of SpyGate-related evidence to Congress in early December of 2017. That included a very large batch of Strzok/Page text messages. The Strzok/Page text messages that were unredacted got an immense amount of press coverage.
Later, some text messages were unredacted in which the pair is seen discussing attempting to influence Judge Rudolph Contreras, who was presiding over Flynn's perjury case.
[Immediately after General Flynn pleaded guilty to a single count of perjury with that 302 form as the key evidence, Judge Contreras was suddenly recused from the case and replaced by Judge Emmet Sullivan]
At no time in the next two years, did we see the text messages that revealed Strzok and Page had also been discussing tampering with the FD-302 form from the Flynn interview at the White House back on January 24, 2017.
This means Barr must have not only recently declassified these particular Strzok/Page texts about tampering with the 302 form, the Attorney General went a step further and paved the way for this now declassified key SpyGate evidence to be given to Flynn's lawyers.
It is transparently obvious that Powell is able to legally use this official FBI document as an exhibit in her court filing because this is an authorized disclosure and the Attorney General approved it. Because if it was not an authorized disclosure, Powell would not dare use it in an official court filing.
At this point, it's pretty clear the 302 tampering texts are included in Horowitz's FISA report. So Barr made an early authorized disclosure to Flynn's defense team. Watch, you'll see I'm right when the report is released, and the 302 editing texts are in there.
If you think top FBI officials getting caught tampering with an official document that, after they had altered it, was used to make a bogus perjury charge against General Flynn won't result in criminal prosecutions, you and I are just going to have to disagree about that.
Brian Cates entered the political arena in March 2012, following the death of Andrew Breitbart. He is currently a political columnist for The Epoch Times and UncoverDC. Brian is based in South Texas and is the author of: “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!”
Twitter: @drawandstrike
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