More On The FBI's Perkins Coie RA

RA is Bureauese. The FBI has Field Offices, which are the FBI headquarters within a given territory. However, an FBI Field Office may have one or more satellite offices which are known as Resident Agencies, or RAs, and are named for their locations. So the FBI office located at the Perkins Coie law offices could be regarded as an RA of the Washington Field Office (WFO). Just my little joke.

CTH has a greatly expanded account of this development. The major idea is that there was a computer portal located at the Perkins Coie RA. I don’t see where Sundance learned this, but it makes perfect sense if you consider that during the Tucker segment with Matt Gaetz the office space is referred to as “secure”. If the only things present were a few desks and chairs there wouldn’t be a need for a “secure” space. Further, while susceptible of interpretation, “secure” as applied to a physical space does tend to have rather definite meaning. It’s not much of a stretch at all to conclude, as Sundance does, that those using the “secure” work space at the FBI’s Perkins Coie RA would be able to access the FBI network—including the ability to do various database searches.

That’s rather mind blowing, if you think about it, because what would be the point of FBI agents going to Perkins Coie office space in order to run database searches? In addition to Field Offices and RAs the FBI also operates “off-sites” associated with those offices, sometimes of a highly sensitive nature, but an off-site in a law office? The natural supposition is that, rather than this being a normal FBI “off-site”, there would have been a high degree of cooperation (collusion?) going on between one or more persons at Perkins Coie and whatever FBI personnel accessed that space. One thing leading to another, the possibility would arise that non-FBI personnel might be running such searches. There may be some leaps or gaps in there but the point is that this situation is one that is highly unusual and requires explanation.

Sundance’s guess is that Sussmann—and possibly others—may have been conducting 702 searches. Sundance defines 702 searches as:

simply an unlawful FBI warrantless electronic search of an American (“702” represents the American citizen) into the central database -maintained by the NSA- that contains all electronic data and communication.

That’s not correct, in that such searches are not illegal per se. What is true is that 702 searches are not routine and require special authorization. The question of the extent of NSA data collection is a whole ‘nuther can of worms. It is known that the FBI used contract (non-FBI) employees to conduct such searches, and that the FISA court was highly critical (to say the least) of the clear abuses that were going on. Sundance goes into all that.

With regard to the inception of this Perkins Coie RA in 2012, under Director Mueller, Sundance also has his ideas. I would simply add that 2012 was an election year and that Obama was not a shoo-in. 2012 happens also to be the year that Mueller entered into a memorandum of understanding with the CIA that appears to have allowed the CIA to access FBI databases—an arrangement that would have been quite illegal, in my understanding, if the CIA used that access to conduct searches on US persons.

A last consideration is this. It immediately occurs to me that a logical question would be whether Sussmann may have been, like Rodney Joffe, a CHS for the FBI. One way or another, this relationship raises all sorts of questions that demand answers.