By John Solomon
Opinion Contributor
Opinion Contributor
Don’t tell former FBI general
counsel James Baker that those now-infamous discussions about secretly recording President Donald Trump and
using the tapes to remove him from office were a joke.
He apparently doesn’t believe
it. And he held quite the vantage point — he was on the inside of the bureau’s
leadership in May 2017, when the discussions occurred.
Baker told Congress last week that
his boss — then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe —
was dead serious about the idea of surreptitiously recording the 45th president
and using the evidence to make the case that Trump should be removed from
office, according to my sources.
Baker told lawmakers he wasn’t
in the meeting that McCabe had with Deputy Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein in which the subject came up. But he did have
firsthand conversations with McCabe and the FBI lawyer assigned to McCabe, Lisa
Page, about the issue.
“As far as Baker was concerned,
this was a real plan being discussed,” said a source directly familiar with the
congressional investigation. “It was no laughing matter for the FBI.”
Word of Baker’s testimony
surfaces just days before Rosenstein is set to be interviewed in
private on Thursday by House Judiciary Committee lawmakers.
Since The New York Times first
reported the allegations, Rosenstein, the No. 2 Department of Justice (DOJ)
official, has tried to downplay his role in them. His office has suggested that
he thought the discussions were a joke, that Rosenstein never gave an order to
carry out such a plot, and that he does not believe Trump should be removed
from office.
But making those statements
through a spokesperson is a bit different than having Rosenstein himself face
Congress and answer the questions under penalty of felony if lawmakers think he
is lying.
Baker’s account to lawmakers this
month clearly complicates an already complicated picture for Rosenstein before
Congress, assuming he shows up for Thursday’s interview.
But even more so, Baker’s story
lays bare an extraordinary conversation in which at least some senior FBI
officials thought it within their purview to try to capture the president on
tape and then go to the president’s own Cabinet secretaries, hoping to persuade the senior leaders of
the administration to remove the president from power.
Even more extraordinary is the
timing of such discussions: They occurred, according to Baker’s account, in the
window around FBI Director James Comey’s firing.
Could it be that the leaders of a wounded, stunned FBI were seeking retribution
for their boss’ firing with a secret recording operation?
I doubt this is the power that
Congress intended to be exercised when it created the FBI a century ago, or the
circumstances in which the authors of the 25th Amendment imagined a president’s removal could be
engineered.
This wasn’t a president who was
incapacitated at the time. He was fully exercising his powers — but in a way
the FBI leadership did not like.
And that makes the FBI’s
involvement in the tape-record-then-dump-Trump conversations overtly political
— even if Rosenstein believed the whole idea was farcical.
Keep in mind, this is the same
FBI that, a few months earlier during the 2016 election, had its top
counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok talking to Page — his lover and the top
lawyer to McCabe — about using their official powers to “stop” Trump in
the election and having an “insurance policy” against the GOP nominee. That
insurance policy increasingly looks like an unverified dossier created
by British intelligence operative Christopher Steele — a Trump hater himself —
that was bought and paid for by
the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton ’s
campaign through their mutual law firm.
“You walk away from the Baker
interview with little doubt that the FBI leadership in that 2016-17 time-frame
saw itself as far more than a neutral investigative agency but actually as a
force to stop Trump’s election before it happened and then maybe reversing it
after the election was over,” said a source directly familiar with the
congressional investigation.
Baker provided some other
valuable insights in his congressional interview. He
revealed that he accepted information in the Russia investigation from a lawyer
for the Democratic National Committee.
Sources confirm Baker
admitted he received a version of Steele’s dossier from left-leaning reporter David Corn of Mother Jones magazine, and then forwarded
it to Strzok’s team. Corn says that occurred in November 2016, right after the
election.
That transaction is significant
for two reasons. First, at the time Steele had just been fired from the FBI
probe for leaking to the media and
he wasn’t supposed to be further assisting the probe. So Corn essentially acted
as a back door to allow information to continue to flow.
Secondly, the FBI was using the news media as
an investigative source outside the normal chain of evidence.
Whatever you think of Rosenstein
or the Russia probe, the statements Baker made to Congress have implications
for all Americans.
The FBI was created to
investigate crimes and stop foreign intelligence and terrorism threats. It was
never designed to be a broker in the political process of elections or the
execution of the 25th Amendment.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose
work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the
Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in
drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He is The Hill’s
executive vice president for video.
Former FBI General Counsel James Baker
told lawmakers last week that based on conversations with senior FBI officials,
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was “seriously” considering secretly
recording President Trump’s conversations. Rosenstein also discussed the
possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment on the president in an effort to
remove him from office for being unfit. This, according to sources with direct
knowledge of Baker’s deposition.
Baker said he met with former FBI
Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and former FBI attorney Lisa Page shortly after
their meeting with Rosenstein in May, 2017. He told lawmakers that McCabe, Page
and Rosenstein had discussed the possibility of secretly recording President
Trump. Baker, who was the top lawyer for the FBI and a close confidant of
Comey, noted that he was not in the meeting with Rosenstein. A source with
direct knowledge of the testimony claims Baker testified that “Andy McCabe,
Lisa Page took seriously what Rosenstein had said, and when they returned to
the office, the three of them discussed the possibility of secretly recording
Trump.”
Baker
told lawmakers during his deposition last Wednesday, that he told Page and
McCabe that “he didn’t think it was unethical’ to secretly record the
president.
“He interpreted what McCabe and Page
had said as serious,” another source with direct knowledge of Baker’s
deposition said. “Baker also added that he ‘didn’t do a legal analysis on…the
issue of ‘ bugging the president.'”
Baker’s testimony to lawmakers
coincides with a New York Times story published
in September that suggested Rosenstein was behind a move in May, 2017 to remove
the president after he ordered the firing of former FBI Director James Comey.
The irony, however, was that on May 9, 2017, Rosenstein had written the letter
outlining the reasons Comey was unfit to serve as FBI director stating, “The
director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General’s authority on July 5, 2016,
and announce his conclusion that the case should be closed without prosecution.
It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement.” The
letter continues, “The Director ignored another longstanding principle: we do
not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject
of a declined criminal investigation.”
Baker told lawmakers that “he didn’t think it was unethical’ to
secretly record the president…”
On Monday, President Trump flew to
Florida with Rosenstein in their first sit-down meeting since the New York
Times story was published. According to the White House, Trump and
Rosenstein met for a half-hour as they headed to the International Association
of Chiefs of Police Annual Convention in Orlando, Fla.
Trump said at the event in Florida,
“Thank you as well to our Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein for being
here, flew down together. The press wants to know, ‘What did you talk about?’
‘We had a very good talk,’ I will say. That became a very big story, actually.
We had a good talk.” (One
should note that Trump has allowed some of the “Swampers” to take a soft exit.
I believe Trump will not fire [RR] he will let him resign. It is my
understanding that if he fires [RR] then his successor has to be confirmed by
the U.S. Senate but if [RR] resigns Trump can appoint his successor.)
It is unsure if the situation will
remain the same in light of Baker’s testimony. However, Rosenstein is set to give his deposition to
lawmakers on Oct. 11 regarding the information published in the New York
Times story, along with the information recently provided by Baker, several
congressional lawmakers confirmed to SaraACarter.com.
White House officials did not comment
on the deposition by Baker but instead referred comment to the DOJ.
DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores
declined to comment on Baker’s testimony.
But Baker’s testimony revealed even
more than the circumstances surrounding the Rosenstein meeting with Page and
McCabe.
He also noted that David Corn, a politics
journalist with Mother’s Jones magazine also delivered a version of
Steele’s dossier to him sometime after the election. Baker, who apparently has
known Corn for a long time, said that he turned over the dossier version given
to him by Corn to the FBI’s counterintelligence division. Corn had been communicating in
the summer of 2016 with former British spy Christopher Steele, who
during that time was hired by now embattled research firm Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS’s was paid over $9
million to conduct the research on alleged Russia Trump connections by
both the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign,
according to reports.
Around the same time period Corn
published one of the first big exposes in October, 2016 on the alleged Trump
Russia connection A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI
Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump. Corn’s
dossier appears to have been different than the dossier that now deceased “No
Name” gave to the FBI but similar enough in its unsubstantiated substance.
In August, John Solomon published Did FBI get bamboozled by
multiple versions of the Trump dossier ?
Solomon noted that the dossiers arrived
to the FBI by different messengers to include “No Name, Mother Jones
reporter David Corn, Fusion GPS founder (and Steele boss) Glenn Simpson.” The
information was exposed in an email that Peter Strzok sent to FBI
executives around the time BuzzFeed published a version of
the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017.
Strzok wrote in the email, “our
internal system is blocking the site. I have the PDF via iPhone but it’s 25.6MB.
Comparing now. The set is only identical to what “No Name” had. (it has
differences from what was given to us by Corn and Simpson.)” Strzok was
referring to the BuzzFeed version of the dossier posted online, according to
The Hill. And the
revelation is significant according to lawmakers that noted the FBI should be
working diligently to ensure that there is no manipulation of evidence or
stacked circular reporting in investigations.
Last week, SaraACarter.com revealed that Baker also met with
the Democratic party’s top lawyer, Michael Sussmann, to discuss the
ongoing investigation by the bureau into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties with
Russia.
According to Baker’s deposition, the
meeting happened prior to the FBI’s initial warrant to spy on short-term
campaign volunteer Carter Page, sources close to the investigation have told
SaraACarter.com. Moreover, information provided by Baker coincides with the House Intelligence Committee’s
final Russia report that suggests Sussmann was also leaking unverified
information on the Trump campaign to journalists around the same time he met
with Baker, according to the report and sources close the investigation.
The information exposes the bureau’s
failure to inform the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)
that the evidence used to spy on Page was partisan and unverified, lawmakers
told this news outlet. It
further reveals the extensive role and close connection Sussmann, a cybersecurity and
national security lawyer with Perkins Coie, had with the now-embattled research
firm, Fusion GPS.
The Democratic National Committee and
Hillary Clinton Campaign retained Fusion GPS through Perkins Coie law firm
during the 2016 election.
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