The FBI conspiracy that matters

[bigtree]

Washington Post @washingtonpost 3m3 minutes ago
Opinion: There may have been an FBI conspiracy involving the 2016 election. But not the one you think. https://t.co/UF9dXgpueX

... a group of FBI agents in the bureau’s New York office seems to have been doing everything it could in the fall of 2016 to make sure Clinton wouldn’t become president. We don’t know their names. We haven’t read their texts. We may eventually learn the full extent of the actions they took, since the inspector general is conducting a separate investigation that involves them. But to this point, it has been something only the most dedicated aficionados of the story of how James B. Comey all but handed Trump the election knew anything about.

Let’s begin with the fact that during 2016, the FBI’s New York office was by numerous accounts the epicenter of an effort to undermine Clinton through leaks to the media and prominent Republicans. As one report put it just before the election, “Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.” As one agent put it, “The FBI is Trumpland.” A former Justice Department official told Vanity Fair in 2017, “It was widely understood that there was a faction in [the New York] office that couldn’t stand her and was out to get her.”

Their efforts became critical when the office, in the course of its investigation of Anthony Weiner, husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin, acquired Weiner’s laptop on Sept. 26, 2016, and found on it thousands of emails to and from Clinton. Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and Trump’s most slavish water carrier, said last week: “We had whistleblowers that came to us in late September of 2016 who talked to us about this laptop sitting up in New York that had additional emails on it. So good F.B.I. agents brought this to our attention.” It’s a bit curious to characterize FBI agents who rushed to tell a Republican congressman about Weiner’s laptop within just a few days of its discovery, and before they had gone through the emails to see whether there was anything problematic about them (which, it turned out, there wasn’t), as “whistleblowers.” Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said yesterday that Nunes never told him at the time.

At the same time, there were agents leaking information about investigations into the Clinton Foundation to none other than Rudy Giuliani, who would then go and air the charges on Fox News. Two days before Comey would tell Congress that the bureau had reopened the investigation into Clinton’s emails — a blockbuster announcement that may well have thrown the election to Trump — Giuliani said on Fox News, “I do think that all of these revelations about Hillary Clinton finally are beginning to have an impact. He’s got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next two days.”

To give you one more example, just days before the election, an FBI source told Fox News’s Bret Baier that Clinton’s email had been hacked and she would soon be indicted — a false story that Baier later apologized for airing...

read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/06/18/there-may-have-been-an-fbi-conspiracy-involving-the-2016-election-but-not-the-one-you-think/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.69b83440c819

[Anon-C]

1. No wonder Trump hates WaPo...they work!

[NewJeffCT]

2. Glad the mainstream media is picking this up

Seth Abramson on Twitter has been on this issue since December 2016.

[Hortensis]

3. So have they. And guess what: you and I

(AND third-party news interpreters like Abramson) know about this because of media who can afford to pay for the kind of excellent investigative journalism we're seeing.

Our founding fathers understood the value of the fourth estate, and so I've heard does Mueller. His resources are far more powerful and broader, of course, and include resources of many other nations, but our investigative journalists have nevertheless provided some valuable information before they got to it.

[Mc Mike]

4. I remember when the repugs were all worked up about an fbi 'secret society'.

This group of freaks in the NY field office, with Mercer and Ghouliani, is the real fbi secret society.

[kentuck]

5. While they point fingers and accuse everyone else of one conspiracy or another...

...they are guilty of the very acts that they accuse others of doing.

[Wounded Bear]

6. It's about fucking time...

This was pretty obvious to anybody really paying attention.