DOJ attorney George Toscas will be deposed Thursday as part of a congressional investigation into possible FISA abuse.
Staffers with the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees will quiz Toscas about DOJ official Bruce Ohr.
Ohr will be interviewed on Aug. 28.
House Republicans will resume an investigation of the FBI and DOJ’s handling of the Russia investigation on Thursday with a deposition of George Z. Toscas, a national security attorney at the Department of Justice.
Toscas, who handles counterterrorism and counterespionage cases, will appear for a deposition at 10 a.m. before staffers with the House Judiciary and House Government & Oversight Committees, a source familiar with the matter tells The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Toscas was one of 17 current and former FBI and Justice Department officials included on a list submitted to the two House committees by California Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Nunes suggested interviewing Toscas and the other officials regarding an investigation into the FBI and Justice Department’s possible abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Congressional Republicans have probed whether the agencies misled federal surveillance judges by relying on the unverified Steele dossier to obtain FISA warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Toscas is mentioned throughout text messages exchanged between former FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page. Strzok and Page, neither of which work for the FBI (Strzok was fired on Aug. 10), mentioned Toscas most often during the FBI’s Hillary Clinton email investigation.
The Washington Post has reported that Toscas was the Justice Department official who reminded then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe about Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. McCabe had been informed about the emails weeks earlier but failed to take action on them until late-October 2016.
Strzok and Page, who have already been interviewed by the House panels, also mention Toscas in text messages sent at key points in the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Strzok sent one message to Page on July 30, 2016, the day before the FBI opened the Russia probe, that appears to reference Toscas and then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
“Do you know if Andy got concurrence back from George about the preamble? No need to ask Andy right now, I think we can in very good faith date the [letterhead memorandum] July 2016,” Strzok wrote.
TheDCNF’s source says that Republicans will ask Toscas about the origins of the government’s Russia probe as well as about Bruce Ohr, the Justice Department official who served as a back channel between the FBI and Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier.
Ohr was also in contact with Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired Steele as part of an anti-Trump project financed by the Clinton campaign and DNC.
Ohr’s wife, a Russia expert named Nellie Ohr, worked for Fusion GPS on the Trump project.
Ohr, who was demoted in December from his position as assistant deputy attorney general, will be interviewed by the two House committees on Aug. 28.
Republicans want to know who at the Justice Department, if anyone, directed Ohr to maintain contact with Steele. The relationship has raised questions because the FBI cut ties with Steele on Nov. 1, 2016 because of the former spy’s unauthorized contacts with the media.
Lawmakers have also questioned why Ohr was meeting with Steele despite claims from top DOJ officials that he was not on the team leading the Russia investigation.
“To my knowledge he wasn’t working on the Russian matter,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified on June 28.
Ohr was interviewed a dozen times by the FBI after the election about his interactions with Steele. Text messages and emails recently provided to Congress also show that Ohr and Steele were in contact throughout 2016 and 2017.
Rachel Brand, and Rod Rosenstein both should leave.
Rachel Brand, the associate attorney general in the Department of Justice, is stepping down from her position, Fox News has confirmed. (Reuters)
Rachel Brand, associate attorney general in the Department of Justice, is stepping down from her position, Fox News confirmed on Friday. Brand, the No. 3 official in the DOJ, will be leaving following a nine-month tenure in the role.
A friend of Brand’s says she was “not looking to leave,” but was approached with a “dream job.” Brand will now head to work for Walmart as executive vice president, global governance and corporate secretary.
DOJ officials say Principal Deputy Associate AG Jesse Panuccio will step in as the acting Associate Attorney General.
All 3 needs to go.
In the line of succession, Brand had been behind Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein is overseeing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. She was in line to oversee the investigation if Rosenstein stepped down.
Should Rosenstein step down now, Solicitor General Noel Francisco would take over the probe, not Panuccio. (Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia inquiry last year.)
“The men and women of the Department of Justice impress me every day,” Brand said in a statement on Friday. “I am proud of what we have been able to accomplish over my time here. I want to thank Attorney General Sessions for his leadership over this Department. I’ve seen firsthand his commitment to the rule of law and to keeping the American people safe.”
Brand had been overseeing the DOJ’s antitrust, civil and civil rights divisons. She also assisted in an extension of the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program.
Brand, Sessions said in the same statement, “played a critical role in helping us accomplish our goals as a Department—taking on human trafficking, protecting free speech on campus, and fighting sexual harassment in public housing.
“And when I asked her to take the lead in the Department’s efforts on Section 702 re-authorization, she made this her top priority and combined her expertise and gravitas to help pass legislation keeping this crucial national security tool. Rachel has shown real leadership over many important divisions at the Department. I know the entire Department of Justice will miss her, but we join together in congratulating her on this new opportunity in the private sector. She will always remain a part of the Department of Justice family.”
Currie Gunn, Brand’s assistant, has also left the department, according to The Times.
Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore pulled out a handgun during a campaign rally Monday night.
During the rally — which came just hours ahead of the Republican primary runoff Tuesday — Moore said he dealt with nearly three months of negative ads, ABC News reported.
“Ads that were completely false. That I don’t believe in the Second Amendment,” Moore, a former state Supreme Court chief justice, said.
He then turned and pulled out a handgun, while saying: “I believe in the Second Amendment.”
The comment was met with cheers from the audience.
Moore headed into Election Day leading in polls over Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.), who has the backing of President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Strange’s allies had poured nearly $11 million into the race as of Friday, and Strange’s campaign organization has outspent Moore by more than 300 percent.
The winner of the Tuesday runoff election will face Democrat Doug Jones in the December general election as Republican try to keep the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Trump on Monday said that if Alabama voters elected Moore, Democrats would win the general election for the seat.
Conservatives figures like 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon have backed Moore as an anti-establishment Republican.
One of the good guys and Trump throws him under the bus.
Trump: Sessions should have told me about recusal, ‘I would have picked somebody else’
President Trump criticized Attorney General Jeff Sessions in an interview Wednesday for recusing himself from overseeing the Russia investigation, calling the move “very unfair to the president” and expressing regret that he nominated Mr. Sessions.
In an interview with The New York Times, the president said Mr. Sessions’ decision in March led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, a development that Mr. Trump said shouldn’t have happened.
“Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Sessions recused himself from overseeing any investigation into possible collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russia, saying it was improper in part because he helped on the campaign, and because he neglected to disclose at his Senate confirmation hearing that he had met twice with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice during the campaign.
More than four months after Mr. Sessions’ recusal, Mr. Trump showed he is still frustrated by the decision of one of his earliest campaign supporters.
“Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president,” Mr. Trump told the Times. “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair — and that’s a mild word — to the president.”
The president also blamed Mr. Sessions for his testimony during the Senate confirmation hearing for overlooking his meetings with Mr. Kislyak.
“Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” the president said. “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”
Asked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line if it expanded beyond Russia to look at Mr. Trump’s family’s finances, the president said, “I would say yes. I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.”
He also said he doesn’t think he is being investigated for potential obstruction of justice for firing FBI Director James B. Comey.
“I don’t think we’re under investigation,” he said. “I’m not under investigation. For what? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
NYT: Immigration Hard-Liners Rising in Trump Administration
Advocates who want America’s immigration laws enforced have found a home in President Donald Trump’s administration, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kulish reports.
For years, a network of immigration hard-liners in Washington was known chiefly for fending off proposals to legalize the status of more people. But with the election of a like-minded president, these groups have moved unexpectedly to offense from defense, with some of their leaders now in positions to carry out their agenda on a national scale.
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Mr. Trump’s senior White House adviser, Stephen Miller, worked tirelessly to defeat immigration reform as a staff member for Senator Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general. Gene P. Hamilton, who worked on illegal immigration as Mr. Sessions’s counsel on the Judiciary Committee, is now a senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of the Border Patrol and ICE, where Mr. Feere is working. Julia Hahn, who wrote about immigration for Breitbart — with headlines like “Republican-Led Congress Oversees Large-Scale Importation of Somali Migrants” — has followed her former boss, Stephen K. Bannon, to the White House as a deputy policy strategist.
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Their influence is already being felt. Mr. Trump is known for his sound-bite-ready pledges to deport millions of people here illegally and to build a border wall, but some of the administration’s more technical yet critical changes to immigration procedures came directly from officials with long ties to the hard-line groups.
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Even those who have labored for decades to scale back immigration did not expect such a dramatic change. “This is inconceivable a year ago,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “Frankly, it’s almost inconceivable six months ago.”
