In response to a question about the alleged Papadopoulos wine bar conversation that officially started the investigation in July of 2016, Barr said, “It’s significant also that the dossier was initiated before July.”68
There certainly seems to be more to learn about the FBI’s use of confidential sources to target the Trump campaign. “They sent in multiple confidential human sources wearing wires,” says Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). “One of the things that’s so offensive—it’s clear these guys assumed Hillary would win, which would mean there’d be no accountability at all. They could get away with this because no one would check.”69
One thing we can check already is the disparate treatment among those accused of making false statements to the FBI. Trump supporter Papadopoulos was prosecuted but Mifsud was not. Also not prosecuted was Andrew McCabe, the FBI deputy director who played a central role in managing the Russia investigation. Inspector General Horowitz concluded he repeatedly and knowingly made false statements to FBI agents about his leaks to the Wall Street Journal. Despite a criminal referral, McCabe’s never been charged. Given that the two of us have both written for the Journal, we’re not going to say it’s a bad place to send unauthorized exclusives. But we can still recognize a double standard when we see one in the treatment of people who aren’t candid with FBI agents.
Also not charged was former FBI director Comey. When FBI agents showed up at his home after he was fired, he told them he had returned all official documents. But later we learned he had not given up his handwritten notes of meetings with Trump. He saved those for a professor friend to leak and successfully used them to trigger the hiring of a special counsel.
In early 2017 the FBI engineered the prosecution of Trump national security adviser Lieutenant General Michael Flynn (U.S. Army, ret.) even though FBI personnel who interviewed him initially said he didn’t lie to them.70 And the evidence did not support a criminal charge, as America finally learned in 2020 with the release of transcripts of his telephone calls.
In truth, the FBI shouldn’t even have been interviewing Flynn. In the final days of the Obama administration the FBI pretended to be investigating him for allegedly violating something called the Logan Act, a 1799 law under which no one has ever been convicted because it would be ruled unconstitutional if ever tested in court. The law purported to make it a crime for citizens to intervene in disputes between the United States and foreign governments.
Specifically, the FBI was trying to claim that Flynn had run afoul of the law while talking on the phone with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition in December of 2016. The idea was to try to call it a crime when an adviser to the president-elect disagrees with the policies of the outgoing administration. “To use this abusive law against the incoming national security adviser was utterly absurd,” says George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley.71
Attorney General William Barr agrees and adds: “This wasn’t just a private citizen, you know, engaged in negotiations to the detriment of the United States. This was somebody coming into office in a transition—which is an officially recognized function of the United States—and discussing future relations.”72
No doubt Obama administration officials knew it was a scam that would never fly in court. But they hoped to use the process of investigating this pretend crime to trap Flynn into making an inaccurate statement to the FBI and then prosecute him for that. When the call transcripts were finally released to the public in May of 2020, they didn’t reveal some grand conspiracy but simply showed Flynn advocating for America and our friends overseas. He urged the Russians not to throw U.S. diplomats out of Moscow, encouraged cooperation “against this radical Islamist crowd,” and thanked Kislyak for the ambassador’s offer to help delay an anti-Israel vote at the United Nations.73
But Flynn, a decorated military veteran and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, fought a years-long legal battle before the Justice Department withdrew its charges in 2020 (though a federal judge has sought to prevent the case from being dismissed). And in what has become a disturbing FBI habit, once again the bureau failed to disclose exculpatory evidence.
Attorney General Barr says that “it’s unusual for an outgoing administration, high-level officials, to be unmasking very, very much in the days they’re preparing to leave office. Makes you wonder what they were doing. Unmasking used to be fairly rare. It’s become more common, but it should be very rare at the higher levels of government.”74
There were other problems with the Flynn prosecution. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote to Attorney General William Barr in April of 2020: “This is no ordinary criminal case. One of the agents who interviewed Lt. Gen. Flynn, Peter Strzok, was later removed from the Russia investigation after his texts demonstrating animus and bias toward the President were discovered. Additionally, former Director McCabe was fired for lack of candor regarding a leak to the Wall Street Journal, and Lt. Gen. Flynn was an adverse witness in a pending sexual discrimination case against Mr. McCabe at the time Mr. McCabe was supervising an inquiry targeting Lt. Gen. Flynn.”75
Sounds like reason enough for McCabe not to be involved. As for the FBI’s Peter Strzok and his texts, many of the most outrageous were shared with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Such affairs are particularly dangerous in counterintelligence work because they increase the risk of blackmail by hostile foreign powers.
What’s dangerous for liberty is to have powerful law enforcement officials driven by political motives. While investigating Hillary Clinton for her mishandling of classified information, Page and Strzok seemed to have decided to pull their punches, lest the FBI attract Clinton’s ire along with that of its parent agency, the Department of Justice. The following text exchange occurred in February of 2016:
PAGE: She might be our next president. The
