FBI Texts and Dueling Memos Escalate Fight Over Russia Inquiry
January 26, 2018 by admin
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Adding to the rising turbulence, Republicans are also pointing with alarm to newly revealed texts between two F.B.I. officials who were once part of Mr. Mueller’s team, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Mr. Mueller removed Mr. Strzok from his team over the summer after learning that the two had exchanged texts expressing a dislike of Mr. Trump.
The Republican memo, which was written by Mr. Nunes’s staff, is said to claim that the F.B.I. abused its powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to spy on the Trump campaign. Democrats did not know it existed until a committee meeting last week, during which its members voted along party lines to share it with the rest of the House.
Republicans, conservative commentators and social media accounts linked to Russian influence networks immediately began calling for the memo’s public release, portraying it as revealing a major scandal. Committee Republicans are reportedly weighing whether to invoke an obscure House rule to make public classified materials.
People familiar with the memo said it centers on a fall 2016 application for a FISA warrant targeting Carter Page, a onetime member of the Trump presidential campaign who had recently visited Russia. The memo is said to stress that the application used information from a former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, without adequately explaining to the judge that his research was financed by Democrats.
But people familiar with the underlying application have portrayed the Republican memo as misleading in part because Mr. Steele’s information, which was also compiled into a notorious dossier, was insufficient to meet the standard for a FISA warrant. The application, they said, drew on other intelligence that the Republican memo misleadingly omits — but revealing that other information to rebut the memo would risk blowing other sources and methods of intelligence-gathering about Russia.
The Justice Department is “unaware of any wrongdoing relating to the FISA process,” Mr. Boyd wrote. He also revealed that Mr. Nunes has not personally examined the underlying materials on which his memo is based, but rather had delegated that task to Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina. Mr. Boyd also wrote that the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, had personally asked to let the bureau see a copy of the memo, but had been rebuffed.
A spokesman for Mr. Nunes, Jack Langer, said: “Agencies that are under investigation by congressional committees don’t typically get access to the committees’ investigative documents about them, and it’s no surprise these agencies don’t want the abuses we’ve found to be made public. Furthermore, there were no limitations placed on disseminating this information, and we will continue to fulfill our oversight responsibilities in accordance with House rules.”
Credit
Cliff Owen/Associated Press
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Schiff refused to discuss the details of the dispute, but said the Republican memo “is misleading in what it says, and it’s misleading in what it omits.”
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Mr. Schiff portrayed the report as part of a campaign dating to Mr. Nunes’s announcement in the spring that he intended to tell the White House that the Obama administration had improperly “unmasked” the identities of Mr. Trump’s associates in intelligence reports. It later emerged that Mr. Nunes had learned that from Mr. Trump’s aides at the White House, and other Republicans concluded that there had been no improper unmasking.
Mr. Schiff said that Democrats would ask the committee on Monday to make their rival memo available to the House on the same terms as the Republican memo, and that if the president declassified the Republican document, he should do the same for the Democratic version. But Mr. Schiff said that he thought the better course was for both memos to remain classified.
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The texts between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page provided more fuel for the partisan rancor.
Republican lawmakers have said texts that the Justice Department gave to Congress last week, supplementing another set that lawmakers received last year, show pervasive political bias against Mr. Trump. Republicans also portrayed phrases in the texts, including a reference to a “secret society” in the F.B.I., as hints of a conspiracy to sabotage him.
“The texts between Strzok and Page referenced a ‘secret society,’” Representative John Ratcliffe, Republican of Texas, wrote on Twitter, adding: “It’s clear from the thousands of texts we reviewed that Strzok and Page held a manifest bias against @realDonaldTrump in favor of Hillary Clinton and showed an intent to act upon that bias.”
Other people familiar with the texts agreed that they showed the two officials expressing many negative opinions about Mr. Trump and his team — like declaring “what a disaster” after learning that Jeff Sessions would be the attorney general.
But one of those people, a Democratic congressional aide, maintained that Republicans’ insinuations that the texts also showed signs of a conspiracy was based on cherry-picking and portrayed as sinister phrases that, in context, were instead tongue-in-cheek banter.
For example, the aide said the reference to a “secret society” the day after the election occurred in an exchange between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page in which one noted: “Are you even going to give out your calendars? Seems kind of depressing. Maybe it should just be the first meeting of the secret society.”
Another person familiar with that exchange said the team had bought Russia-theme calendars to give out to the agents and analysts investigating Russia’s interference in the election, and in light of the election results, Ms. Page was making a dark joke about the gag gifts.
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The F.B.I. has also informed Congress that it discovered that the bureau did not preserve text messages between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page between mid-December 2016 and mid-May 2017. It blamed misconfigured software that prevented the automatic retention of such data from many bureau officials who were using Samsung 5 phones provided by the F.B.I.
Mr. Trump suggested that the missing texts were worse than Watergate, the scandal that brought down Richard M. Nixon, comparing the months of missing messages to the 18.5 minutes of crucial White House tape that was mysteriously erased after the Watergate break-in.
“When you look at five months, this is the late, great Rose Mary Woods, right?” Mr. Trump told reporters, referring to Nixon’s secretary, who took the blame for inadvertently erasing part of a taped conversation between him and his chief of staff three days after the burglary at the Democratic Party headquarters.
“This is a large-scale version,” Mr. Trump said. “That was 18 minutes; this was five months.”
“They say it’s 50,000 texts, and it’s prime time,” he added, referring incorrectly to the number of texts between the two officials that the Justice Department inspector general has reviewed. The number of missing texts is not known. “That’s disturbing.”
Correction: January 24, 2018
An earlier version of this article misidentified the F.B.I. official who made reference to a “secret society” the day after the election. It was Lisa Page, not Peter Strzok.
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Milan train derailment leaves at least 3 dead, many injured
January 26, 2018 by admin
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At least three people were killed when a train derailed near Milan on Thursday.
(AP)
An Italian commuter train derailed Thursday morning near Milan, killing three people and seriously injuring at least 13 others as some passengers became trapped in mangled cars.
The Trenord train derailed near Pioltello Limito station, less than 13 miles outside of Milan, at a switch track. At least two cars from the middle of the train moved off the rails and were left standing at an angle.
At least 13 other people were seriously injured after a train derailed in Milan, Italy.
(ANSA)
“There currently are three dead, five severely injured and eight injured in ‘code yellow,’ all of which in hospital,” an Interior Ministry in Milan spokesperson told Reuters.
Dozens of people were also injured less severely.
Train traffic into and out of Milan was halted for hours after rescuers removed passengers that were caught in the cars. Commuters said they felt the car shake for a few minutes before hearing a big bang. Next came the car’s roof and walls caving in on them.
“Two carriages were half-worn, [it was] a chilling scene,” A passenger told Italy’s Rai News. “And I was lucky to get [sic] another car that is not derailed.”
Passengers recalled the train car caving in after hearing a loud bang.
(Vigili del fuoco)
“There seemed to be some stones under the train and then the train stopped, they made us get off and the rescue arrived half an hour later,” one person said.
Another passenger told ANSA: “It was all right, suddenly the train started to shake, then there was a roar and the carriages came out of the tracks.”
Authorities believe the switch track played a role in the derailment. The train was heading from Cremona, in eastern Lombardy, to Milan’s Garibaldi station that morning.
Trenord, a regional train company serving the Lombardy region, has a notorious track record among riders. People often complain the trains are dirty, packed with people and delayed.
The company’s social media page said the delays due to the train derailment were caused by a “technical inconvenience.”
The train derailment caused hours of delays into and out of Milan
(ANSA)
It was the latest incident involving Italy’s aging rail system. In 2016, 23 people were killed when two trains collided on a single track in an olive grove in Puglia, southeastern Italy. In 2009, 32 people were killed when a freight train carrying liquefied petroleum gas derailed and exploded in Viareggio, in central Italy’s Tuscany region.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Katherine Lam is a breaking and trending news digital producer for Fox News. Follow her on Twitter at @bykatherinelam