Saunders: Senate committees cast shadow on FBI probe tactics

This is Washington, so not telling the truth about leaking may seem pretty routine. Max Bergmann, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said that talking to the media when you are not supposed to is common for “like every politician in Washington.” But as Grassley and Graham pointed out, lying to the FBI is a crime.

If Steele did not tell the FBI that he did not talk to the media, that presents a different problem. It would mean that the FBI was not leveling with the court when it sought a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.

On Wednesday, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson released a report that hit “high-level FBI officials” for their behavior in the probe on Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

Texts between FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page, which were reported previously, have laid bare the anti-Trump and pro-Clinton views of the couple, who were having an affair and texting each other on government phones.

Strzok’s judgment was so spectacularly bad that Special Counsel Robert Mueller removed him from the Russia probe after Inspector General Michael Horowitz showed him the texts in July. Strzok also worked on the Clinton investigation — the one where FBI Director James Comey drafted a statement exonerating the presidential hopeful before the FBI interviewed her.

Same names popping up

Why does the same cluster of names keep popping up in political investigations?

You get Mueller, who is close to Comey and a former FBI director, investigating Trump’s firing of former FBI Director Comey. And you get Strzok involved in probes of both 2016 nominees along with his lover, though she left the Trump probe rather quickly.

Throw in the FBI’s applications for FISA warrants with the dubious claims about Steele not talking to the media, and Stewart sees “abuses of power by people in very powerful positions in the FBI.”

When the Johnson Committee report disclosed that Page texted Strzok on Sept. 2, 2016, that former President Barack Obama “wants to see everything we’re doing,” the Trump corner wondered exactly what that meant.

“My understanding of that is that the president (Obama) is about to go see Vladimir Putin,” Bergmann explained, and hence wanted to know the latest on Russian mischief. “If we’re going to accuse a world leader, we don’t want to go in thin.”

Probably Bergmann is right. But really, there’s only one way for voters to know — a release of the Democrats’ rebuttal, which the House Intelligence Committee can do, followed by a release of the FISA warrant applications.