This is how many on the left want most Universities to look
• Qatar gave $1 billion to elite American universities since 2011, according to Department of Education data.
• The Qatar Foundation is suing the Texas attorney general to prevent information about Qatari funding from becoming public.
• Universities are taking money from Qatar, a nation with a checkered human rights history, as students rally for social justice causes.
The nation of Qatar, a Sharia-law monarchy that has been accused of trying to influence other countries’ governments, gave $1 billion to elite American universities since 2011, according to Department of Education data.
Some universities have refused to discuss where strings are attached to that money. The Qatar Foundation, for example, filed a lawsuit against the Texas attorney general Oct. 12 to hide information about the $225 million Qatar has awarded to Texas A&M University since 2011.
The Qatar Foundation hired the politically connected powerhouse law firm Squire Patton Boggs for the suit, which was filed in response to a researcher’s public information request regarding the foreign funding.
The biggest recipient of Qatar’s educational funding, Georgetown University, repeatedly ignored requests from The Daily Caller News Foundation for basic information about the funding and whether it implicates academic independence.
Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have accused Qatar of meddling in other nations’ internal affairs as well as funding terrorism. Qatar also wields influence through its media group, Al Jazeera.
Top Foreign Funders of U.S. Universities, 2011-2016 (Source: Department of Education)
Country
Amount
Qatar
$1,024,065,043
England
$761,586,394
Saudi Arabia
$613,608,797
China
$426,526,085
Canada
$402,535,603
Hong Kong
$394,446,859
For a nation seeking sway over the U.S., Georgetown University would be a particularly tactical site of influence. Georgetown has received nearly $333 million from Qatar since 2011 — far more than any other U.S. school has received from any foreign nation.
Georgetown is situated in the seat of power, near the State Department, and its experts are frequently cited by groups shaping policy. In fact, the Jesuit Catholic university trains many of the United States’ future diplomats at its Walsh School of Foreign Service.
Its website notes that “At SFS, you can study with former Secretaries of State” and access “connections to diplomats from just about every country, and of course, the seat of the U.S. government. Our location gives SFS the extraordinary opportunity for us to engage (and sometimes even influence) the debates that lead to real action.”
Thanks to the Qatari funding, Georgetown and its foreign service program has an entire outpost in Qatar. “Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) is an additional location of Georgetown University, based in Education City in Doha,” its website says. “The University offers a four year undergraduate program in international affairs leading to the Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service (BSFS) degree.”
Students from VCU’s home campus visit the Imam Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab Mosque, the national mosque of Qatar. Source: VCU
The magnitude of liberal-leaning universities’ reliance on the foreign nation, a poster child for income inequality, provides a stark contrast. As U.S. college students clamor for university endowments to divest from fossil fuels, the schools take money from the oil-rich kingdom. As they rally for social justice causes, Qatar has a checkered human rights record.
Qatar has only 313,000 citizens, and 2.3 million foreigners dwelling there, many of them laborers serving the country’s elite, according to 2017 data.
“The tragedy of 1.7 million migrant workers trapped in Qatar defines modern day slavery,” the International Trade Union Confederation said in 2015.
Nepalese laborers died at a rate of almost one a day in Qatar, according to The Guardian.
“We were working on an empty stomach for 24 hours; 12 hours’ work and then no food all night,” one said. “When I complained, my manager assaulted me, kicked me out of the labor camp I lived in and refused to pay me anything.”
In Washington, professors of Islamic issues have engaged in activism. Jonathan A. C. Brown, a convert to Islam and the director of the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown, which Qatar rival Saudi Arabia funds, offered an Islam-based defense of slavery, concubinage and non-consensual sex.
“The Prophet of God had slaves. He had slaves. There’s no denying that,” he said in 2017 at an International Institute of Islamic Thought talk. “Was he — are you more morally mature than the Prophet of God? No, you’re not. I’ll answer your question for you.” (RELATED: Before Killing Of Journalist, Elite Universities Took $600M From Saudis)
Studying abroad forms a bond between U.S. students and Qatar and helps Qatari nationals learn about the U.S., according to marketing materials.
Top Recipients of Qatar-Affiliated Funding to Universities, 2011-2016 (Source: Department of Education)
Country
Amount
Georgetown University
$332,818,297
Northwestern University
$277,456,289
Texas A&M University
$225,455,141
Carnegie Mellon University
$71,456,401
Cornell University
$47,577,242
Virginia Commonwealth University
$40,117,185
University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
$7,860,694
Harvard University
$7,693,947
Purdue University
$2,794,462
Arizona State University
$2,276,044
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
$1,223,630
Meanwhile, college students have adopted a fondness for the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions to Israel movement.
The vast majority of funds from Qatar were contracts, the Education Department data shows, requiring Georgetown to do something in return for the money, unlike gifts.
Georgetown spokesman Matt Hill ignored questions from TheDCNF about the strings attached to such funds and whether they could influence curriculum and would not provide the contract governing them.
The dean of Georgetown’s Qatar campus is Ahmad Dallal, who the Middle East Forum describes as “a long-time and enthusiastic supporter of the State Department-designated terrorist group Hezbollah. Dallal, who chaired Georgetown’s Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies from 2003 to 2009, is also pro-Hamas, pro-Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, co-author of an Arabic textbook whose maps omit Israel, and signatory of a letter warning that Israel would engage in ‘ethnic cleansing’ at the start of the Iraq war.”
The Zachor Legal Institute, which opposes the movement to sanction and boycott Israel, submitted a Freedom of Information request in May to Texas A&M (TAMU), a state university, for “a summary of all amounts of funding or donations received” from Qatar and a long list of proxies.
The office of state Attorney General Ken Paxton ruled “the university must withhold the donors’ identifying information … the university must release the remaining information.”
Most of the money to TAMU were contracts, not donations.
The Qatar Foundation’s high-powered lawyers intervened, arguing the relevant portion of the attorney general’s ruling “requiring release of all remaining information other than donor identity is incorrect and without force or effect.”
They wrote:
This is an action to prevent disclosure of confidential financial information concerning the relationship between QF and Texas A&M University … QF operates programs dedicated to education, science, and community development. It is responsible for funding much of the development in Education City, a hub for higher education outside Doha. … In addition to TAMU, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, and Virginia Commonwealth University have all established campuses in Education City.
The Attorney General concluded that TAMU could withhold information identifying ‘donors’ under section 552.1235. But the Attorney General stated that TAMU would be required to release all remaining information requested, which would include information related to payments made by QF to TAMU pursuant to a contract. In so doing, the Attorney General implicitly ruled that those payments were not ‘donations,’ and therefore not exempt from disclosure under the PIA … The information related to these grants and donations is also confidential commercial information and constitutes a trade secret.
The Qatar Foundation’s general counsel is Michael Mitchell, a former vice president of Ohio State University.
Marc Greendorfer, an attorney for the Zachor Legal Institute, responded to the Texas attorney general Nov. 8: “One of the Qatari entities that was the subject of our original request has taken the extraordinary step of taking the Texas Attorney General to court to suppress the information that we requested. Now, with the most recent attempt by TAMU to prevent public disclosure of information as to how Qatari entities are involved with a Texas public university, the intrigue grows, and we have to wonder what it is they are trying to keep from the public.”
TAMU and the Qatar Foundation did not return requests for comment.
The university operations by Qatar are just one prong in a massive public relations and influence push that includes millions to lobbyists and public relations firms in the U.S.
It is also not the only involvement of Squire Patton Boggs with Middle Eastern countries. The same law firm also has a $100,000-a-month contract with Qatar’s rival Saudi Arabia for the kingdom to retain former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and former Democratic Louisiana Sen. John Breaux.
According to Foreign Agent Registration Act disclosures, it worked directly with Saud al-Qahtani, the same aide who allegedly organized the killing of a
The Justice Department and FBI have missed a Wednesday deadline to provide information about the government’s mysterious raid on a former FBI contractor-turned-whistleblower’s home last month.
Sixteen FBI agents on Nov. 19 raided the home of Dennis Nathan Cain, who reportedly gave the Justice Department’s Inspector General (IG) documents related to the Uranium One controversy and potential wrongdoing by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The documents in question allegedly showed that federal officials failed to investigate possible criminal activity related to Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and Rosatom, a Russian nuclear company. Its subsidiary purchased Canadian mining company Uranium One in 2013.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, whose panel has oversight of the Justice Department, penned a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Justice Department IG General Michael Horowitz, requesting information on the justification for the raid. Grassley gave Wray and Horowitz until Dec. 12 to respond to his request.
That deadline has come and gone, and neither the FBI nor DOJ has produced any documents or response.
“We have not yet received answers to the chairman’s questions on this matter,” a Judiciary Commitee spokesperson told Fox News late Thursday.
The FBI consistently has refused Fox News’ request for comment on the whistleblower raid and the Judiciary Committee’s requests. On Thursday, an FBI spokesperson told Fox News the agency would respond only to inquiries from the entity that requested the documents — in this case, the Judiciary Committee.
Questioning whether “we now live in a secret police state,” Cain took his frustration about the situation to Twitter earlier this week.
“So I blow the whistle on the FBI, get raided by the same FBI, and now they want to keep the FBI’s reasons secret? Do we now live in a secret police state? Feels a little like 1984,” Cain tweeted late Monday. The tweet eventually was deleted.
The Daily Caller requested that a court unseal the relevant search warrant materials, but the U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, in a court filing, said: “the request should be denied.”
“Public disclosure of any search warrant materials would seriously jeopardize the integrity of the ongoing investigation,” the filing by the U.S. Attorney’s Office said. “Continued sealing is essential in order to guard against possible tampering of witnesses and destruction of evidence, to maintain the ability of the grand jury to investigate this matter, and to prevent the disclosure of sensitive investigative techniques and methods.”
A spokesperson for U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Robert K. Hur declined to comment.
Cain’s lawyer, Michael Socarras, told The Daily Caller the agent who led the raid accused his client of possessing stolen federal property. In response, Cain reportedly claimed he was a protected whistleblower under federal law, and said he was recognized as such by Horowitz.
Socarras also claimed Horowitz had transmitted information on the sale of Uranium One to a Russian firm’s subsidiary to both the House and Senate intelligence committees.
The bureau refuses to release 37 pages of new documents related to the controversial deal; reaction and analysis from Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz, former Republican congressman from Utah.
A spokesperson for the inspector general declined to comment.
“As frustrating and violating as this feels to me and my family. I will continue to put my trust in God. Some day this life will pass away. I will stand before my maker with a clean concience[sic] and Jesus as my defender. Until then I continue to fight the good fight with God’s help,” Cain tweeted Monday night.
On Tuesday, he added: “Thank you for the outpouring of encouragement. You all are awesome. A boxer goes into his corner to rest for a minute, refocus, and get some sideline coaching. Then the bell rings and he’s ready to go another round. This fight is spiritual and God is in our corner. Ding! Rom 8:31.”
Thank you for the outpouring of encourment. You all are awesome. A boxer goes into his corner to rest for a minute, refocus, and get some sideline coaching. Then the bell rings and he’s ready to go another round. This fight is spiritual and God is in our corner. Ding! Rom 8:31
Fox News has previously reported that Douglas Campbell, an FBI informant involved in the Uranium One deal, has testified to lawmakers that Moscow paid millions to American lobbying firm APCO Worldwide to influence Clinton and the Obama administration.
“The contract called for four payments of $750,000 over 12 months,” Campbell said in his statement this past February. “APCO was expected to give assistance free of charge to the Clinton Global Initiative as part of their effort to create a favorable environment to ensure the Obama administration made affirmative decisions on everything from Uranium One to the US-Russia Civilian Nuclear Cooperation agreement.”
APCO has denied Campbell’s claims while Clinton called any claims of wrongdoing related to the Uranium One deal “the same baloney they’ve been peddling for years, and there’s been no credible evidence by anyone.
“In fact,” Clinton told C-SPAN in October 2017, “it’s been debunked repeatedly and will continue to be debunked.”
Separately, the DOJ and Special Counsel Robert Mueller face a Friday afternoon deadline to turn over documents related to their questioning of fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn’s team has alleged the FBI pressured him not to have a lawyer at the White House meeting in January 2017, after which Flynn was charged on one count of lying to federal authorities.
Flynn — who had to sell his house this year amid mounting legal bills — later pleaded guilty to lying to agents about a conversation he had with the Russian ambassador in December 2016 about sanctions that had recently been imposed by then-President Barack Obama. Flynn has since acknowledged seeking to convince Russia not to retaliate for those sanctions during the presidential transition period.
But Flynn’s lawyers, in an explosive Tuesday court filing that threatens to upend his pending sentencing, charged that the FBI had not finalized their pivotal, and only, account of Flynn’s statements until August 2017 — nearly eight months after their interview with him. Fired FBI Director James Comey has since admitted the Flynn meeting broke normal agency protocol.
The Office of the Special Counsel deleted text messages from the iPhone of fired FBI agent Peter Strzok before turning it over to the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG), according to a report released by the federal watchdog.
On Thursday, the Justice Department’s inspector general released a report stating thousands of text messages exchanged between Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page could not be recovered after Mueller’s team wiped clean the phones it had issued them.
So Mueller’s team wiped ALL of the data off of Peter Strzok’s iPhone after determining “it contained no substantive text messages.” Given what we know about Strzok, this smells like quite the coverup. Time for Congress to step in?
“SCO’s Records Officer told the OIG that as part of the office’s records retention procedure, the officer reviewed Strzok’s DOJ issued iPhone after he returned it to the SCO and determined it contained no substantive text messages,” the watchdog report reads. As Conservative Review national security reporter Jordan Schachtel first discovered, the OIG said Strzok’s cell phone was “reset to factory settings,” deleting all data stored on the device.
The federal watchdog said in the report it found “no discernible patterns” about the content of thousands of messages the FBI was able to recover between Strzok and Page. Both have been part of Mueller’s investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Strzok and Page testified before Congress this summer, and the former FBI agent admitted that he had not turned over all of his communications with Page to the Inspector General from his personal phone, even though their recovered conversations showed the two suggesting they move to apps like iMessage or Gmail. Strzok told outgoing Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) that it is a “safe assumption” that he sent messages to Page from his personal phone that were similar in nature to the widely-publicized messages attacking Trump supporters. He told House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) that he himself determined which messages on that phone were “relevant to FBI business” that the Inspector General could review.
At that time of their exchanges, the FBI was investigating whether former secretary of state and then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton improperly used a private email account while she was Secretary of State. Strzok, a senior counterintelligence agent, was assigned to the case, as was Page. Reports claimed the two were romantically involved during this time. Strzok was ultimately fired after anti-Trump text messages between him and Page were discovered by the special counsel.
Thursday’s report said the FBI used special software to collect more than 20,000 text messages from the pair’s phones, but not all were sent between Strzok and Page. Investigators have already released some of the controversial texts, including a message from Strzok saying he would “stop” President Donald Trump from winning the election.
Missing text messages from the pair’s iPhones, though, continue to elude the FBI.
Early this year, the Office of the Inspector General contacted Verizon Wireless to determine if the carrier retains old text messages. Verizon said messages are retained for up to seven days after they are sent, and then erased. The missing messages in question were much older than a week by that time and Verizon no longer had them.
Flynn should have known better. He is a scumbag anyway with his Turkish connection.
Andrew McCabe urged Michael Flynn to meet with FBI agents without White House attorneys present, according to a court filing submitted Tuesday in the special counsel’s probe.
McCabe and other FBI officials also decided not to provide a warning to Flynn about penalties regarding lying to the FBI.
Though Flynn’s lawyers are suggesting he was trapped into lying to the FBI, the new filing does not explain why the retired lieutenant general made false statements about his interactions with Russia’s ambassador
Just days into President Donald Trump’s tenure, then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe urged then-national security adviser Michael Flynn to meet with two FBI agents without White House lawyers present, claiming that a limited meeting would be the “quickest” way to have a conversation about Flynn’s discussions weeks earlier with Russia’s ambassador.
As if that scenario was not fraught with enough legal landmines, Flynn was also not warned by the two agents he met with about the penalties for lying to federal investigators. That’s because McCabe and other FBI officials decided before the fateful Jan. 24, 2017 meeting that “they wanted Flynn to be relaxed.” The officials “were concerned that giving the warnings might adversely affect the rapport” between Flynn and his FBI interlocutors.
Those revelations are tucked into a 178-page filing that Flynn’s lawyers submitted on Tuesday in the special counsel’s investigation.
While the filing contains new details about the White House interview, Flynn’s team does not provide an explanation for why the retired lieutenant general made false statements to the FBI agents, aside from saying that he “recognizes that his actions were wrong and he accepts full responsibility for them.”
While Flynn’s lawyers said in the filing that he is remorseful for lying to the FBI during that Jan. 24, 2017 meeting, the activities of McCabe and the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn are sure to generate outcry about overreach in the Russia investigation. Flynn’s supporters have noted that McCabe and one of the FBI agents, Peter Strzok, have run into ethical and legal problems of their own.
According to the filing, McCabe wrote in a memo just after arranging the White House visit that he suggested to Flynn that attorneys stay out of the interview in order to save time.
“I explained that I thought the quickest way to get this done was to have a conversation between [General Flynn] and the agents only,” McCabe wrote.
Flynn went along with McCabe’s suggestion, telling McCabe that involving White House lawyers “would not be necessary.” He agreed “to meet with the agents without any additional participants,” according to McCabe.
Less than two hours after that conversation, Peter Strzok, the FBI counterintelligence official leading the Russia probe, visited Flynn along with another FBI agent.
According to notes cited by Flynn’s lead attorney, Robert Kelner, one of the two FBI interviewers noted that Flynn was “relaxed and jocular” during their session. The agent said that Flynn appeared to treat the FBI agents as allies.
Seemingly acting on instructions from FBI brass, “the agents did not provide General Flynn with a warning of the penalties for making a false statement under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 before, during, or after the interview,” Kelner writes.
Flynn has since acknowledged giving false statements during that interview. He pleaded guilty on Dec. 1, 2017 to lying to the FBI agents about conversations he had in December 2016 with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Flynn’s lawyers are seeking no jail time for the former lieutenant general, a request that is in line with prosecutors’ recommendation in a filing submitted on Dec. 4. Special counsel Robert Mueller in that filing cited Flynn’s “substantial assistance” in three separate investigations.
Kelner noted that Flynn, who was fired as national security adviser on Feb. 13, 2017, continued cooperating with the special counsel’s office “even when circumstances later came to light that prompted extensive public debate about the investigation of General Flynn.”
The lawyer appeared to be referencing the firestorm surrounding McCabe and Strzok.
McCabe was fired on March 16 after the FBI’s personnel office and Justice Department inspector general determined that he made misleading statements under oath about authorizing leaks to the media in October 2016 regarding an investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
Prosecutors are reportedly pursuing a case against McCabe.
Strzok was removed from the Mueller investigation in July 2017 and fired from the FBI on Aug. 13 of this year because of anti-Trump text messages he exchanged with his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page.
Kelner noted that Flynn met with the special counsel’s office five times before entering his plea deal on Dec. 1, 2017. He had 14 more meeting with prosecutors after striking the agreement.
The filing did not address other legal issues Flynn has faced.
As part of his plea deal, Flynn acknowledged making false statements when he registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent of Turkey for consulting work he did during the campaign. Flynn’s plea deal protected him from being prosecuted by the special counsel for his Turkish lobbying. Prosecutors in Virginia are investigating some of Flynn’s former business partners.
If you thought the Supreme Court would be Conservative, well think again.
The Supreme Court declined to review three cases relating to Republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood at the state level Monday, over a vigorous dissent from Justice Clarence Thomas.
The dissent was significant because it indicates that Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with the high court’s liberal wing to deny review of a lower court decision that favored the nation’s largest abortion provider.
“So what explains the Court’s refusal to do its job here?,” Thomas wrote. “I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named ‘Planned Parenthood.’”
I guest Brett forgot what the damn liberals did to he and his family.
“Some tenuous connection to a politically fraught issue does not justify abdicating our judicial duty,” Thomas added. “If anything, neutrally applying the law is all the more important when political issues are in the background.”
Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch joined the Thomas dissent, meaning there were three votes in favor of taking the case. Since four votes are needed for the Supreme Court to take up a case, the opinion indicates that Chief Justice John Roberts and Kavanaugh joined with the four liberals to deny review.
This move could indicate that Roberts and Kavanaugh are loath to take take up an abortion-related question in the aftermath of Kavanaugh’s contentious confirmation. The Court’s new junior justice has generally kept a low profile since taking the bench in October.
Both of these phonies are liberals.
Justice Clarence Thomas participates in taking a new family photo with his fellow justices at the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Monday’s cases arose when Republican state leaders in Louisiana and Kansas stripped Planned Parenthood of state Medicaid funds after a pro-life advocacy group presented evidence that the abortion-provider was harvesting and selling fetal materials. Planned Parenthood contests the accuracy of these claims.
Planned Parenthood and several unnamed female patients challenged the states’ move in federal court. The legal question in Monday’s cases was whether Medicaid recipients can challenge the disqualification of a provider under the Medicaid law. As such, it did not touch on abortion directly.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Planned Parenthood on that question in June 2017, prompting an appeal to the Supreme Court. That ruling is left in place now that the justices have refused to take the case.
Pro-life groups swiftly expressed their displeasure following Monday’s announcement.
“We are disappointed the Supreme Court declined to hear this case,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List. “The pro-life citizens of states like Kansas and Louisiana, through their elected representatives, have clearly expressed their will: they do not want Medicaid tax dollars used to prop up abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood.”
The Trump administration is currently formulating a new federal regulation called the Protect Life Rule which would forbid public funding of Planned Parenthood under Title X.
Former FBI Director James Comey revealed in closed-door testimony with House Republicans on Friday that he deliberately concealed an explosive memorandum about his one-on-one Oval Office meeting with President Trump in February 2017 from top Department of Justice officials.
The former FBI head also acknowledged that when the agency initiated its counterintelligence probe into possible collusion between Trump campaign officials and the Russian government in July 2016, investigators “didn’t know whether we had anything” and that “in fact, when I was fired as director [in May 2017], I still didn’t know whether there was anything to it.”
His remarks square with testimony this summer from former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, whose anti-Trump texts became a focus of House GOP oversight efforts. Page told Congress in a closed-door deposition that “even as far as May 2017” — more than nine months after the counterintelligence probe commenced — “we still couldn’t answer the question” as to whether Trump staff had improperly colluded with Russia.
Comey further testified on Friday that he and his aides were “all very concerned” about how the president had spoken of the probe into fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn in a private Oval Office meeting, according to a 235-page transcript of his remarks released as a part of an agreement between House Republicans and Comey.
Former FBI Director James Comey testifies in closed-door interview on the Hill; chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports.
The fired FBI director wrote in his memorandum that Trump had told him, “I hope you can let this go,” amid reports that Flynn had lied to the FBI and senior White House officials about his contacts with Russia’s government.
But despite that concern, Comey told Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, that he and his team made a “judgment call” not to tell then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions or his lieutenants about Trump’s comments, saying he thought Sessions would recuse himself “in a matter of days” from the Russia probe.
“We agreed that we ought to hold it very close, not brief the investigative team at this point and not go over and talk to the leadership of the Department of Justice, to hold onto it until we got a new deputy attorney general and they sorted out how they were going to supervise the Russia investigation,” Comey said.
Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, at center, pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. (AP)
Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was later fired for leaking a self-serving story to the press and lying about it to Comey and federal investigators, was among the brain trust Comey sat down with to discuss his options. The two were joined, Comey said, by then-FBI General Counsel James Baker and Comey’s chief of staff, James Rybicki.
Comey told lawmakers that others may have been present as well, including FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich (who was an associate deputy director at the time), National Security Branch Executive Director Carl Ghattas, and FBI counterintelligence head Bill Priestap, who recently announced he would leave the agency by year-end. Comey said that he did not believe anti-Trump FBI Agent Peter Strzok or former FBI lawyer Lisa Page were in the room.
Comey testified: “We believed that the Attorney General, Mr. Sessions, was on the cusp of recusing himself from anything related to Russia, so it didn’t make any sense to brief him on it, and that there was no deputy attorney general at that point.” (Sally Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, was terminated by Trump in late January 2017 after she refused to defend the administration’s ban on travel from several Muslim-majority nations in court.)
“We agreed that we ought to hold it very close.”
— Former FBI Director James Comey
Sessions recused himself from Russia-related matters shortly afterward, in early March 2017 — a decision that Trump has since called a “terrible mistake,” although it was recommended by career Justice Department officials in part because Sessions had met with Russian dignitaries while assisting with the Trump campaign. But Jordan pressed Comey on why he decided not to tell the next-in-command at the DOJ.
Lawmakers release transcript of testimony from former FBI Director James Comey; reaction from Rep. Jim Jordan, Republican member of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees.
“I don’t know who was No. 3 at that point,” Comey responded. “There was an acting — there was a U.S. Attorney acting as the deputy attorney general, who we knew would be in the seat only until Rod Rosenstein was confirmed,” he added, in an apparent reference to former Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente, who served until Rosenstein took the job in April 2017.
Comey continued that “it made sense to hold onto it” because “we saw no investigative urgency.”
But unredacted sections of Comey’s other memoranda documenting his conversations with Trump apparently demonstrate that he later did inform Boente and other top DOJ officials about other sensitive matters concerning his conversations with the president.
In a memorandum documenting his phone conversation with Trump on March 30, 2017, about how to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation from the White House, Comey wrote, “I called the acting attorney general and relayed the substance of the above and said I was telling him so he could decide what guidance to give me, if any.”
In a call from the White House that day, Comey wrote that Trump had asked him “several times” to “find a way to get out” to the public that he was not actively under investigation as part of the ongoing federal probe into possible Russia collusion with his team. Comey assured Trump, and congressional leaders, that the president was not being investigated at the time.
Former FBI Director James Comey, with his attorney, David Kelley, right, speaks to reporters after a day of testimony before the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Friday, Dec. 7, 2018. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) (Associated Press)
House Republicans are set to have another opportunity to question Comey before they lose majority status when the new Congress is seated in January. The fired FBI director told reporters his return visit for more testimony will likely come the “week after next.”
Comey largely frustrated GOP lawmakers during Friday’s session, in large part because his lawyers urged him not to answer numerous questions. On Twitter after his testimony, Comey sharply criticized what he characterized as Republicans’ “desperate attempt to find anything that can be used to attack the institutions of justice investigating this president.”
But while Comey insisted in the interview that “we never investigated the Trump campaign for political purposes,” the transcript shows he claimed ignorance or memory lapses in response to questions concerning key details and events in the Russia investigation, which some GOP lawmakers continue to claim was improperly conducted.
The transcript reveals lawmakers’ frustration with his lack of specifics. Asked if he recalled who drafted the FBI’s “initiation document” for the July 2016 Russia investigation, Comey said, “I do not.” He again claimed not to know when asked about the involvement in that initiation of Peter Strzok, whose anti-Trump texts later got him removed from the special counsel’s probe.
When asked if the FBI had any evidence that anyone in the Trump campaign conspired to hack the DNC server, Comey gave a lengthy answer referring to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation as to why he couldn’t answer.
Early Sunday, Trump slammed Comey’s testimony repeatedly on Twitter, deriding him as “Leakin’ James Comey.”
On 245occasions, former FBI Director James Comey told House investigators he didn’t know, didn’t recall, or couldn’t remember things when asked. Opened investigations on 4 Americans (not 2) – didn’t know who signed off and didn’t know Christopher Steele. All lies!
Leakin’ James Comey must have set a record for who lied the most to Congress in one day. His Friday testimony was so untruthful! This whole deal is a Rigged Fraud headed up by dishonest people who would do anything so that I could not become President. They are now exposed!
But there was a time when Comey, by his own accounting, didn’t think of himself as the kind of person who would leak information behind the president’s back.
In a Jan. 28, 2017, dinner with Trump in the White House’s Green Room, Comey wrote in a since-released memorandum that he told the president, “I don’t do sneaky things, I don’t leak, I don’t do weasel moves.“
James Comey Admits FBI Was Still Probing ‘Pee’ Dossier Until Day He Was Fired
At the time James B. Comey was fired as FBI director, his agency was still attempting to corroborate claims made in the infamous, largely-discredited anti-Trump dossier, Comey admitted.
In testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on Friday, Comey described an effort “to try to replicate, either rule in or rule out, as much of that collection of reports that’s commonly now called the Steele dossier as possible, and that that work was ongoing when I was fired.” Trump dismissed Comey from the FBI on May 9, 2017.
A transcript of Comey’s testimony was released on Saturday. During one exchange with lawmakers, Comey said that FBI efforts to probe the dossier given to the agency by former British spy Christopher Steele started “sometime in ’16” almost immediately after Steele provided the charges.
The timing is instructive. In previous testimony, Comey admitted that he pushed back against a January 2017 request from President Donald Trump to possibly investigate the origins of the claims made inside the Steele dossier.
Comey’s latest testimony shows that even while he was cautioning Trump against ordering a probe of the dossier claims, Comey’s own FBI was quietly conducting an ongoing investigation into the wild content of that very dossier.
During prepared remarks for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, delivered on June 8, 2017, Comey related how he pushed back against a suggestion from Trump to investigate the dossier claims.
The former FBI chief stated that following a January 6 Oval Office meeting with Intelligence Community leaders, Comey “remained alone with the President Elect to brief him on some personally sensitive aspects of the information assembled during the assessment.”’
It is clear Comey was referring to the dossier since he writes the “salacious and unverified” material was about to be publicly reported by the news media. Four days after that briefing, the dossier was published by BuzzFeed.
In his statement summarizing his conversation with Trump, Comey refers to Russian prostitutes, a key component of the dossier:
He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia.
In a private White House dinner with Trump on January 27, Comey says the topic of the “salacious material” again came up and he reveals that Trump was considering asking the FBI to investigate the origins of the claims. Comey pushed back against that idea.
Comey writes:
During the dinner, the President returned to the salacious material I had briefed him about on January 6, and, as he had done previously, expressed his disgust for the allegations and strongly denied them. He said he was considering ordering me to investigate the alleged incident to prove it didn’t happen. I replied that he should give that careful thought because it might create a narrative that we were investigating him personally, which we weren’t, and because it was very difficult to prove a negative. He said he would think about it and asked me to think about it.
The Steele dossier was reportedly funded by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) via the Perkins Coie law firm.
A House Intelligence Committee memo released last February documented that as FBI director, Comey signed three FISA applications to spy on former Trump adviser Carter Page with the dossier serving as part of the basis for the warrant requests.
Comey signed the applications without telling the FISA court that the dossier was financed by Trump’s primary political opponents, the memo related.
“Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials,” the memo states.
The GOP memo also relates that after Steele was terminated months earlier as an FBI source a “source validation report conducted by an independent unit within FBI assessed Steele’s reporting as only minimally corroborated.” Still, Comey saw fit, according to the Republican and Democrat memos, to utilize the dossier in the FISA documents. He also briefed Trump and then-President Barack Obama on the dossier contents.
