OPINION: This article contains commentary which may reflect the author’s opinion
Crossfire Hurricane caused prolonged nasty flooding of bad actors to be set a drift into the public square from within the leadership levels of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and as the torrential tides of their corrupted works have subsided on this one case, Americans are seeing the storm debris of greedy and anti-American behaviors left around like litter.
There have been no consequences for the massive corruption at the highest levels of government to date, but we do have reports which point out the wrong-doing.
According to a recent OIG report, there was an investigation, and one more corrupt FBI agent was found guilty of leaking important information to the media, including leaking a draft of a report, in a report titled:
Findings of Misconduct by a then Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) Employee for Unauthorized Disclosure of Sensitive, Non-Public Information to the Media, including Information from a Draft DOJ OIG Report
According to the report: “Upon reporting by a media outlet that it had reviewed a draft report of the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the DOJ OIG referred for investigation to the Integrity Committee of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), as required by the Inspector General Act, the question of whether one or more DOJ OIG employees had disclosed the draft DOJ OIG report or other sensitive, non-public information
about the then-ongoing DOJ OIG review to the media without authorization.”
In other words- the guy this report is about- was leaking drafted documents to his media pals, and he was also taking gifts from his media pals.
Crossfire Hurricane was the code name for the counterintelligence investigation undertaken by the (FBI) from July 31, 2016, to May 17, 2017.
The Wikipedia Page on Crossfire gives us a great summary:
At issue were the alleged links between Russian officials and associates of Donald J. Trump and “whether individuals associated with [his] presidential campaign were coordinating, wittingly or unwittingly, with the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election”, according to court documents.
The investigation was officially opened on July 31, 2016, initially due to information on Trump campaign member George Papadopoulos’s early assertions of Russians having damaging material on Trump’s rival candidate Hillary Clinton.
The FBI’s work was taken over on May 17, 2017, by the Special Counsel investigation of 2017–2019, which eventually resulted in the Mueller Report. Mueller concluded that Russian interference occurred in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” and that there were substantial links with the Trump campaign, but the evidence available to investigators did not establish that the Trump campaign had “conspired or coordinated” with the Russian government.
Trump and his allies repeatedly alleged that the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was opened on false pretenses for political purposes.
The Inspector-General blew off those concerns but determined that the FBI made 17 errors or omissions in its FISA warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court) for surveillance of Trump aide Carter Page.
It was undercover in a 2018 OIG report that a top FBI press officer by the name of Michael Kortan accepted tickets to baseball games from a CNN journalist in May 2016 and September 2016 and Kortan also accepted tickets from a New York Times reporter.
Now here is some more fraud that has been uncovered about another FBI agent who took gifts from the media :
“The former FBI official who oversaw investigations into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and the Donald Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with the Russian government had dozens of unauthorized contacts with the media and accepted unauthorized gifts from members of the media, according to the OIG report, “American Military News reported about the report on Thursday.
“Steinbach had hundreds of contacts with the media for several years as Assistant Director (AD) for the Counterterrorism Division (CTD) starting in June 2014 and then after his promotion to EAD of NSB,” Inspector General Michael Horowitz wrote in the investigative synopsis.
“This media contact included social engagements outside of FBI headquarters without any coordination from Office of Public Affairs (OPA), involving drinks, lunches and dinners.”
In his leadership role in the NSB in 2016, Steinbach answered directly to FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. At the time, the NSB was investigating Clinton and Trump.
The investigation found Steinbach had at least 27 in-person meetings with seven media members outside of FBI Headquarters between April 2014 and the date of his retirement in February 2017 and found no evidence that Steinbach coordinated with OPA before these meetings.
The investigative documents also included several text exchanges between Steinbach and various reporters, including at least one CNN reporter.
In that exchange, Steinbach discussed getting tickets to the White House Correspondents Dinner. The CNN reporter texted Steinbach saying, “I put you on the map and now you’re cheating on me with [reporter’s first and last name]?” to which Steinbach replied, “I kept waiting for my invite from you.”
The inspector general concluded his report by saying that Steinbach “violated Title 5 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) §2635.202, the DOJ Ethics Handbook, and the FBI Ethics and Integrity Program Policy Guide when he accepted tickets from the media to attend two black tie dinner events, one valued at $225 and the other valued at $300, and failed to notify the Office of Integrity and Compliance.”
“The new documents do not accuse Steinbach of unauthorized disclosures to the media, however, Horowitz’s office has raised concerns that unsupervised contacts between FBI officials and members of the media can lead to leaks and make them difficult to investigate,” American Military News reported.
Source: The Republic Brief