If you thought the details of the raid on Mar-a-Lago couldn’t get shadier, you were wrong. Donald Trump has said from the beginning that the raid was another hoax and part of the original witchhunt.
Looks like he was right. The FBI division overseeing the investigation of his Trump’s handling of classified material just so happens to be the focus of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation of FBI abuses during the Russigate probe.
“The FBI’s nine-hour, 30-agent raid of the former president’s Florida estate is part of a counterintelligence case run out of Washington—not Miami, as has been widely reported—according to FBI case documents and sources with knowledge of the matter,” reports the Epoch Times. “The bureau’s counterintelligence division led the 2016–2017 Russia ‘collusion’ investigation of Trump, codenamed ‘Crossfire Hurricane.'”
Peter Strozk, who lead Crossfire Hurricane, was fired and is no longer there, but “several members of his team remain working in the counterintelligence unit, the sources say, even though they are under active investigation by both Durham and the bureau’s disciplinary arm, the Office of Professional Responsibility.”
Strozk infamously told fellow FBI official Lisa Page in texts that the Russia probe was an “insurance policy” in case Trump got elected.
In addition, a key member of the Crossfire team—Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten—has continued to be involved in politically sensitive investigations, including the ongoing federal probe of potentially incriminating content found on the abandoned laptop of President Biden’s son Hunter Biden, according to recent correspondence between the Senate Judiciary Committee and FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI whistleblowers have alleged that Auten tried to falsely discredit derogatory evidence against Hunter Biden during the 2020 campaign by labeling it Russian “disinformation,” an assessment that caused investigative activity to cease.
Auten has been allowed to work on sensitive cases even though he has been under internal investigation since 2019, when Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz referred him for disciplinary review for his role in vetting a Hillary Clinton campaign-funded dossier used by the FBI to obtain a series of wiretap warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Horowitz singled out Auten for cutting a number of corners in the verification process and even allowing information he knew to be incorrect slip into warrant affidavits and mislead the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.
“It is a disgrace that Auten is still even employed by the bureau,” said 27-year FBI veteran Michael Biasello. “I would substitute other analysts and agents.”
Sources also told RealClearInvestigations that the top counterintelligence officer who has been coordinating the investigation of Mar-a-Lago with the FBI’s counterintelligence division is a Democratic National Committee donor named Jay Bratt.
Bratt traveled to Mar-a-Lago in early June and, according to the report, personally inspected the storage facility and personally interacted with Trump and one of his lawyers. “Trump allowed the three FBI agents Bratt brought with him to open boxes in the storage room and look through them,” Epoch Times reports. “They left with some documents. After leaving, Bratt made a request to Trump’s lawyer for increased security at the facility and asked to see surveillance footage from the security cameras. The lawyer complied with the requests.” Then, months later, the FBI inexplicably decided to raid Mar-a-Lago following the approval of a wide-scoped search warrant by anti-Trump magistrate judge Bruce Reinhart.
It’s all starting to make sense now, isn’t it? Anti-Trumpers in the bureau are still up to their old tricks.
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