Here’s our list from March of more than 100 actions the Deep State FBI and DOJ took that were either outside of policy and/or were corrupt and/or were criminal surrounding the 2016 Presidential election and exoneration of Hillary Clinton and the setup/attempts to remove Donald Trump from office –
In 2008, a questionable person on John McCain’s presidential campaign caught the attention of FBI counterintelligence, and the FBI privately approached McCain. That questionable person was quietly removed from Team McCain. The Trump campaign was never afforded this same courtesy [source].
Paul Manafort interviewed with the FBI twice before he joined the Trump campaign [source] (If Manafort was guilty of anything, he was guilty during the time period he served as McCain’s campaign manager, not Trump’s campaign manager, and if Manafort was guilty of anything, why did it take ten years for the FBI to take action against Manafort?) And why didn’t the FBI warn Trump about Manafort if they had concerns?
Somehow every clear security breach in the Clinton camp was no big deal, while every fourth-hand contact with someone who could possibly be linked to Russia was evidence that Donald Trump was secretly serving as a Russian agent [source].
Comey made no public show of his announcement on the Oct. 28, 2016, decision to reopen the Clinton email investigation. Instead, Comey quietly sent a terse and private letter to the chairs and the ranking members of the oversight committees on the Hill, informing them, vaguely, that the FBI was taking additional steps in the Clinton email investigation, unlike the public announcement about the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign [source].
FiveEyes has a standing agreement to not spy on each other’s citizens without a warrant, and yet, the FBI and the CIA frequently accepted both official and unofficial intelligence on members of the Trump campaign, from not only FiveEyes but other countries as well [source].
Additionally with regard to FiveEyes, not using normal intelligence channels for a major counterintelligence investigation and, instead, relying on political channels is another deviation from the standard practice, such as in the instance of Alexander Downer relaying information to the State Department who then passed it on to the FBI [source].
Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, told House lawmakers during a closed-door interview in late 2017 that other than the probe into Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server, he was not aware of any instance in which an FBI exoneration statement was drafted months prior to the conclusion of an investigation as was done (twice) in the case of the Midyear investigation [source].
Right before the election, the DOJ also inexplicably dropped all charges against Marc Turi in the Benghazi legal matter that had lasted for five years. Some saw it as a way to protect Clinton [source].
Comey sidestepped direct questions over whether Clinton’s carelessness should disqualify her from future access to classified information but indicated that any government employee who had similarly handled secret government information would be subject to a rigorous security review to determine “suitability” [source].
IG Report: Nobody was listed as a subject of this [Clinton email] investigation at any point in time (So neither Hillary nor her top aides were formally under investigation by FBI at any time in 2015-2016, but the agents handling the issue thought it was a criminal action) [source].
There was no investigation regarding Bill Clinton’s famously clandestine meeting with the head of the Department of Justice, Loretta Lynch, on a private plane in Phoenix just days before the FBI announced its decision to exonerate Clinton [source].
Lindsey Graham recently argued, in the Washington Post, “You can be an FBI informant. You can be a political operative. But you can’t be both, particularly at the same time.” (The FBI knew of Steele’s politics but continued to engage him).
A deviation from the standard practice is to start an investigation without a crime. Under FBI and Justice Department guidelines for opening a full investigation, agents have to first establish an “articulable factual basis,” which means facts must be specified and verified. And investigators have to have a “reasonable suspicion,” as opposed to mere speculation, that a suspect committed a crime. In a May 19, 2017, text message to McCabe’s counsel Lisa Page, Strzok remarked, “My gut sense and concern is there’s no big there, there” regarding collusion. Page also admitted during a private 2018 congressional interview that when McCabe opened the probes, “We still couldn’t answer the question [of whether Trump conspired with the Kremlin]. … It still existed in the scope of possibility that there would be literally nothing” to connect Trump with Russia [source].
Investigators are tasked with “detecting and interrupting criminal activities at their early stages, and preventing crimes from occurring in the first place,” which is much more preferable than “allowing criminal plots to come to fruition.” According to the DIOG, assessments and investigations should be proactive to stop crimes or “national security-threatening activities.” In other words, law enforcement can’t just sit back and eat popcorn while they watch subjects weave their way toward a crime so they can catch them in the act. The purpose of law enforcement is to actively stop danger in its tracks, not urge it on with passive observation (This occurred not only during the Russian hacking incidents but also with the elements of the Trump campaign that the FBI/Obama admin declared to be troubling) [source].
The FBI’s miss of the Russian influence operation against the 2016 election, which went largely undetected for more than two years (The FBI had the chance to kill this Russian intrusion years before it reached crisis point in the election). Mueller’s Russia probe has found that Moscow’s operation against the 2016 election first got underway in 2014, but the FBI failed to grasp the scope and danger of what was unfolding [source]. The bureau missed the significance of the damaging 2015 hack of the DNC database [source].
Instead of opening an investigation as procedure demands, Comey usurped the role of Loretta Lynch, further compounding the first error) Comey would later say he broke with normal procedures whereby the FBI collects evidence and the Department of Justice decides whether to bring charges, because he believed Attorney General Loretta Lynch had engaged in actions that raised doubts about her credibility, including secretly meeting with Clinton’s husband, the former president, just days before the FBI interviewed her [source].
Peter Strzok forwarded a draft of the warrant to his personal email account in violation of FBI policy and further violated department policy by editing the warrant affidavit on his home email account, bypassing the FBI system for recording such government business. He also began drafting a second exoneration statement before conducting the search [source].
Two FBI investigators were in a “relationship” while they were working on the Clinton email investigation and later were married [source].
Peter Strzok/Lisa Page were having an affair in the middle of a counterintelligence probe and later became part of the Special Counsel Mueller probe, which in and of itself is a compromise [source].
Initially, the FBI and Department of Justice claimed [Bruce Ohr] had no involvement in the probe, despite his marriage to a Fusion GPS contractor. Then they claimed his role was unique and was unknown by others in the