Commentary: Attorney General Barr’s Intelligence Review Should Include the DNC Servers

by Robert Romano   The Hill’s John Solomon made big news on June 6 when he reported that Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, said in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report to be a Russian agent, was an intelligence source for the U.S. State Department. “In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence… What it doesn’t state is that Kilimnik was a ‘sensitive’ intelligence source for State going back to at least 2013 while he was still working for Manafort, according to FBI and State Department memos I reviewed.” This is as startling revelation as any that has been discovered, since it calls into question whether somebody purported to be a Russian intelligence officer by the Justice Department really was. It also calls into question other contacts Trump campaign officials were said to have had with supposed Russian agents, and other actions said to have been perpetrated by supposed Russian agents. Kilimnik was practically the entre basis for saying that Paul Manafort had at least been in touch with somebody connected with Russian intelligence. The Mueller report stated, “[O]n August 2, 2016, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met…

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William Barr Made a Major Disclosure in His Senate Hearing That Hardly Anyone Noticed

by Chuck Ross   In a little-noticed exchange during his Senate hearing Wednesday, Attorney General William Barr made a surprising disclosure that could allow the public and press to obtain sensitive details about the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. During a back-and-forth with Democratic Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, Barr identified Alexander Downer, a former Australian diplomat, as the FBI’s source for the information that sparked the bureau’s counterintelligence investigation into George Papadopoulos and other Trump campaign associates. The federal government had not officially identified Downer as the source until Wednesday. His role in the investigation was publicly known, but only through press reports and his own statements to the media. Federal agencies could deny requests for information about Downer and his role in the opening of “Crossfire Hurricane,” the FBI’s name for the counterintelligence investigation, without official confirmation from U.S. government officials. That all changed on Wednesday, according to Bradley Moss, the deputy executive director of the James Madison Project, a transparency group that handles national security-related lawsuits. “That disclosure by the Attorney General would certainly assist any FOIA litigant seeking additional details about the origins of the Russia investigation, as it appears to be the first time the U.S.…

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Andrew McCabe Defends FBI’s Use Of Steele Dossier, Confidential Informant In Trump-Russia Probe

by Chuck Ross   Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is defending the FBI’s reliance on the Steele dossier as well as the bureau’s use of a confidential informant to make contact with the Trump campaign as part of an investigation into possible collusion with Russia. In an interview as part of a recent book tour, McCabe disputed Republicans’ claims that the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court about aspects of the dossier in applications warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. And in his book, The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump, McCabe defended the use of an informant who appears to be Stefan Halper, a longtime FBI and CIA informant who cozied up to Page and two other Trump advisers, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos, during the 2016 campaign. “I do believe that we adequately notified the FISA Court of the information we were using, and what we thought of the information,” McCabe told New York Times reporter Adam Goldman in an interview that aired on C-SPAN on Saturday. McCabe, who was fired from the FBI on March 16, 2018, said that the bureau’s applications for FISA warrants…

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