Did The FBI Lawyer Who Altered A Doc Work For Strzok?
This morning Fox has its story about the former FBI lawyer--"forced out of the bureau"--who "altered" a document relating to the Carter Page FISA. There are two significant paragraphs in the Fox story--Horowitz reportedly finds FBI lawyer falsified FISA doc; WaPo stealth-deletes Strzok connection --that contain tantalizing information:
The new evidence concerning the altered document, which was related to the FBI's FISA court warrant application to surveil Page, is expected to be outlined in Horowitz's upcoming report. CNN first reported the news, which was largely confirmed by The Washington Post.
The Post, hours after publishing its story, conspicuously removed the portion of its reporting that the FBI employee involved was underneath Peter Strzok , the FBI's since-fired head of counterintelligence. The Post did not offer an explanation for the change, which occurred shortly after midnight. Earlier this week, the DOJ highlighted a slew of anti-Trump text messages sent by Strzok when he was leading the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the probe into the Trump campaign.
Horowitz reportedly found that the FBI employee who modified the FISA document falsely stated that he had "documentation to back up a claim he had made in discussions with the Justice Department about the factual basis" for the FISA warrant application, the Post reported. Then, the FBI employee allegedly "altered an email" to substantiate his inaccurate version of events. The employee has since been forced out of the bureau.
Of course lots of people working Counterintelligence (CI) at FBIHQ would be "underneath" Strzok. However, I doubt that very many FBI lawyers at that level would have been that involved with the Carter Page FISA, so that leads to the suspicion that the misrepresentations to DoJ were made with Strzok's knowledge--possibly even at his request. There can be no doubt that Horowitz pursued that angle and that Durham will continue to press the issue if it hasn't already been resolved. Who else knew besides the lawyer? Surely more than just that lawyer pored over the original documentation that was supposed to provide probably cause against Carter Page (which is required for a FISA against a US person).
The other item of interest confirms my doubt that an original investigative case file document had been altered. It sounds like the lawyer made verbal representations to DoJ and then "altered an email" to corroborate the verbal representations. Again, how would that work? Probably the lawyer who claimed to have an email to support the claimed version of events (a surveillance matter) said he/she would forward the substantiation. But, rather than forwarding the entire email simply "quoted" it--an edited, altered, quote.
Again, we'll be learning more.
An additional point. Sidney Powell, lawyer for Michael Flynn, follows all these developments closely. She will be sure to include reference to this matter in countering government claims that she has "no reason to doubt" their representations regarding the Flynn 302 that was created by Strzok, probably in cooperation with others at the FBI.