Anthony Weiner Hid his E-Devices with Granite Intelligence

He knew what was coming and attempted to hide and store his electronic devices at Granite Intelligence. Lots of interesting stuff on those devices. There is always more to the story, right?

The serial sexter — whose online aliases included “Carlos Danger” — wanted to rid himself of the incriminating evidence and “facilitate transfer to the government” so he could avoid an FBI raid on the Union Square apartment he shared with his wife and young son, a source familiar with the matter said.

Granite Intelligence, which is based in Midtown Manhattan and was co-founded by a former New York City prosecutor, is “committed to resolving our clients’ problems with intelligence, integrity and discretion,” according to its Web site.

Federal agents got permission to seize the electronics on Sept. 26, 2016, and a search of the laptop turned up e-mails between Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, and her boss, then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The discovery led the FBI to re-open its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she served as secretary of state under former President Barack Obama.

Clinton has blamed the reopening of the probe, which then-FBI Director James Comey revealed to Congress 11 days before the 2016 election, for her loss to President Trump.

Last year, Weiner tearfully pleaded guilty to transferring obscene material to a minor, breaking down as he told the judge: “I knew that was morally wrong.”

 

  Below is the other search warrant.

Weiner Warrant by Daniel S Levine on Scribd

Hat tip: District Judge Denise Cote unsealed the search warrant for the laptop and other devices of former Congressman Anthony Weiner on Wednesday, May 16.

Weiner was sentenced by Cote in September to 21 months in prison for sending obscene material—including sexually explicit images and directions to engage in sexual conduct—to a 15-year-old girl through messaging and video chat apps.

New York City Police obtained a search warrant on his laptop, iPad, and iPhone on Sept. 26, 2016, approved by Magistrate Judge Ronald Ellis.

The laptop soon became the center of a major controversy. However, the search warrant suggests the controversy may run deeper still.

On Nov. 4, 2016, former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor Erik Prince said “a very well-placed source” at the NYPD told him the NYPD found “damning criminal information” about then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Weiner’s laptop and threatened to release it if the FBI tried to sweep it under the rug.

The FBI later obtained its own search warrant and looked at the laptop in connection with its investigation into Clinton’s mishandling of classified information as State Secretary.

But there was a notable difference between the FBI warrant and the NYPD one.

The one obtained by NYPD read, in part: “Depending on circumstances, a complete review of the seized [electronically stored information] may require examination of all of the seized data to evaluate its contents and determine whether the data is responsive to the warrant.”

The FBI one read, in part: “Law enforcement personnel will make reasonable efforts to restrict their search to data falling within the categories of evidence specified in the warrant.”

That would suggest the NYPD could look at everything, while the FBI investigators worded its warrant in a way that restricted them to look only at data regarding the mishandling of classified information.

Here’s what we know about how Clinton’s emails ended up on Weiner’s laptop and what repercussions their discovery meant:

Weiner shared the laptop with his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, a close aide to Hillary Clinton since 2000.

Hundreds of thousands of emails were stored on the laptop, including thousands from Clinton.

“Huma Abedin appears to have had a regular practice of forwarding emails to [Weiner] for him,” then-FBI Director James Comey testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on May 3, 2017. “I think, to print out for her, so she could then deliver them to [Clinton].”

The existence of the emails was also confirmed in texts between senior FBI attorney Lisa Page and former head of counterintelligence at the FBI, Peter Strzok.

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Peter Strzok. (FBI)

“Got called up to Andy’s earlier … hundreds of thousands of emails turned over by Weiner’s atty to sdny, indudes a ton of material from spouse,” Strzok texted (pdf) Page on Sept. 28, 2016, only two days after the search warrant: “Sending team up tomorrow to review … this will never end ….”

The text suggests that then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, referred to as Andy, knew of the emails. Strzok noted that a team would go to “review” the next day, Sept. 29, 2016.

But this timeline seems to conflict with a Chicago Tribune story, which said that law enforcement officers first seized the laptop on Oct. 3, according to “federal officials familiar with the investigation.”

The text suggests McCabe knew about the emails on Sept. 28 because Weiner’s attorney himself delivered the emails to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. It is not clear why.

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Then acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on May 11, 2017. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

It was McCabe who led a small group at FBI headquarters on the Clinton investigation. Both Strzok and Page were in that group. Comey announced the conclusion of the investigation on July 5, 2016.

The Hill reported on Nov. 6 that Strzok changed key language in that conclusion from “grossly negligent,” which would have been a crime, to “extremely careless.” Changing the phrase may have exonerated Clinton.

The Weiner laptop turned out to have a trove of Clinton’s emails containing classified information and emails from the first three months of her term as State Secretary—emails that the FBI had not obtained before, Comey said.

But, Comey said it took until Oct. 27, 2016, for their small team to come to him and tell him about the significance of the emails. The group was only looking at the emails’ metadata—such as subject, sent date, and addressee—according to Comey, and asked him whether they should get a search warrant to look at the emails themselves, which Comey approved.

Comey told Fox News’ Bret Baier he didn’t know why it took a month for McCabe to come to him, especially given the significance of the discovery only a few weeks before the presidential election.

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Former FBI Director James Comey testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on June 8, 2017. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

“I think what actually drove it was the prosecutors in New York who were working the criminal case against Weiner called down to headquarters and said, ‘Are we getting a search warrant or not for this?’ That caused, I’m sorry, Justice Department Headquarters, to then call across the street to the FBI and poke the organization; and they start to move much more quickly. I don’t know why there was, if there was slow activity, why it was slow for those first couple of weeks,” Comey said on April 26.

Indeed, at least one high-ranking Justice Department official prodded the team about the Weiner trove.

On Oct. 21, 2016, Strzok texted, “[redacted] called [because] Toscas [is] now aware NY has [Clinton-Abedin] emails via [W]einer invest[igation]. Told him we knew. Wanted to know our thoughts on getting it.”

Strzok was referring to George Toscas, deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

“George wanted to ensure info got to Andy,” Strzok wrote.

It was also Toscas, who, according to The New York Times, criticised Comey for caving to Attorney General Loretta Lynch in calling the Clinton probe a “matter” instead of an investigation back in 2015.

“I guess you’re the Federal Bureau of Matters now,” Toscas said.

But it’s not clear why the New York prosecutors would call Justice Headquarters about a search warrant. They’d had a search warrant for their investigation since Sept. 26. There’s no sign they had anything to do with the Clinton investigation because that was run by the team at the FBI headquarters.

It is also not clear whether Toscas’ call was motivated by the NYPD threat of disclosure Prince talked about. Prince said the NYPD received strong pushback from Obama’s Justice Department—a threat to push charges against the NYPD in an unrelated civil rights case.

Meanwhile, the Strzok texts reveal the team had another contingency on its hands. On Oct. 24, 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported that after the Clinton probe started in July 2015, McCabe’s wife, Jill, received some $675,000 for her Virginia State Senate campaign from Clinton associate Gov. Terry McCauliffe’s political entities.

On Jan. 29, 2016, Comey appointed McCabe deputy director, putting him in charge of the Clinton investigation.

On the day Comey was briefed by the team on Oct. 27, 2016, his chief of staff, Jim Rybicki, wanted McCabe to recuse himself, the Strzok texts suggest, apparently because the public learned McCabe’s wife was getting money from the Clinton camp.

The texts also suggest Page, who was McCabe’s legal counsel, was to recuse herself too, which she apparently wasn’t thrilled about.

“I obviously don’t have to tell you how completely INFURIATED I am with Jim [Rybicki] right now,” she texted.

Later that day she added, “I Just walked in on Jim to force the issue. Me: ‘I’m not recused, but I’m not sitting in on this meeting.’” It’s not clear which meeting she was referring to.

On Oct. 28, 2016, Comey sent a letter to Congress members sitting on oversight committees informing them the Clinton investigation had resumed. The information quickly reached the media, infuriating Democrats.

The team obtained a search warrant for the laptop on Oct. 30, 2016, allowing them to retrieve it from the FBI New York Field Office.

A day later, McCabe recused himself from the investigation, codenamed “Mid Year.”

“Thanks to the wizardry of our technology, we’ve only had to personally read 6,000 [of the emails],” the team told Comey on the night of Nov. 4, he later testified before Congress. “They said, ‘we found a lot on new stuff. We did not find anything that changes our view of [Clinton’s] intent.’”

The lack of intent in being “extremely careless” with classified information was Comey’s justification for not charging Clinton back in July, 2016.

On Nov. 5, 2016, Comey sent another letter to Congress saying all the newly discovered Clinton emails had been reviewed and the previous decision stood—no charges.

 

Law Firm Behind Dossier has Another Lawyer Resigning Ahead of IG Report

Tag team or the whole firm?

So, we know Perkin Coie was the law firm that was hired by Hillary Clinton to pay for the work done on the Trump dossier. The lawyer pinpointed was Marc Elias. Letter of evidence is here. But could there have been another lawyer in the operation, once such Bob Bauer?

P050911PS-0060 | President Barack Obama walks through the ... Bauer on far right

Bauer was formerly the top White House lawyer under the Obama administration. His wife is Anita Dunn who was the White House Communications Director at the same time. She is known for giving a speech where she declared her admiration for Mao Zedong. What a pair eh? Anita by the way is a senior partner at SKDKnickerbocker, a strategic communications firm in DC. Just so you know, SKDKnickerbocker only represents Democrats including Andrew Cuomo and Sandra Fluke. Their favorite issues such as Center for Reproductive Rights, the Obama Presidential Library.

BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO: OBAMA'S ELIGIBILITY LAWYER BEHIND IRS ...

Okay, so meanwhile, her husband, Bob has resigned from Perkins Coie to continue teaching at NYU. He has been a the law firm for 40 years. Bauer served as counsel to the Senate minority leader during former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial of 1999, and took leave from the firm to work as Obama’s White House counsel from 2010 through July 2011.

Obama's Supreme Court point man low-key but tough photo

Bob Bauer is also the legal counsel for the Obama Foundation and the Biden Foundation as well as the Democratic National Committee, where Marc Elias served as chair. Elias was the lead counsel of record for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

Bauer remains in full support of James Comey and his loyalty characteristics. In part from Bauer’s article on Comey is:

Comey writes that at an earlier point in the investigation, he raised with Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates the need for unusual transparency when the investigation was closed. She did not get back to him, he recalls, but soon two events persuaded him that further consultation or coordination was inadvisable. A still-classified email surfaced in the investigation that he believed that partisans would seize on to claim that the attorney general had committed to protect Clinton from legal harm. He did not credit the content of the communication, but feared the consequences of partisan distortions for the reputation of the Justice Department. Then the attorney general announced what Comey refers to as her “tortured half-in, half-out” quasi-recusal following the meeting with Bill Clinton at the Phoenix airport.

It was then that Comey concluded that he would go it alone—a course of action that, without explanation, he refers to as a “crazy idea of personally offering the American people unusual transparency, and doing it without the leadership of the Department of Justice.” To the extent that there was a deliberative process, it occurred entirely within the FBI: there, Comey drew on the advice of his management team. So, on an issue of this magnitude, the circle within which views could be expressed was tightly drawn. Comey addressed the process problem he faced through an ad hoc, closed process of his own. He might have thought he was left with no choice, the other principals having disqualified themselves from participation.

The full item that Bob Bauer wrote is quite the read and you can find it here.

 

 

Obama Intelligence Officials Testify, Russian Meddling

The Senate Intelligence Committee is preparing to question top Obama administration intelligence officials behind closed doors on Wednesday on their explosive assessment that officially accused Russia of meddling in the 2016 presidential election to boost then-candidate Donald Trump.

The committee, led by Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., invited former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan, former National Security Agenda Director Michael Rogers (who retired earlier this year) and former FBI Director James Comey.

DOCUMENTS SUGGEST POSSIBLE COORDINATION BETWEEN CIA, FBI, OBAMA WH AND DEM OFFICIALS EARLY IN TRUMP-RUSSIA PROBE: INVESTIGATORS

Comey, though, plans to skip the closed-door session Wednesday due to a “previously scheduled engagement,” his attorney said.
Deeper dive

Sperry: House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes next plans to investigate the role former CIA Director John Brennan and other Obama intelligence officials played in promoting the salacious and unverified Steele dossier on Donald Trump — including whether Brennan perjured himself in public testimony about it.

In his May 2017 testimony before the intelligence panel, Brennan emphatically denied the dossier factored into the intelligence community’s publicly released conclusion last year that Russia meddled in the 2016 election “to help Trump’s chances of victory.”

Brennan also swore that he did not know who commissioned the anti-Trump research document (excerpt here), even though senior national security and counterintelligence officials at the Justice Department and FBI knew the previous year that the dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Last week, Nunes (R-Calif.) released a declassified memo exposing surveillance “abuses” by the Obama DOJ and FBI in their investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. It said the agencies relied heavily on the uncorroborated dossier to take out a warrant to secretly surveil a Trump adviser in the heat of the 2016 presidential election, even though they were aware the underlying “intelligence” supporting the wiretap order was political opposition research funded by Clinton allies — a material fact they concealed from FISA court judges in four separate applications.

Nunes plans to soon release a separate report detailing the Obama State Department’s role in creating and disseminating the dossier — which has emerged as the foundation of the Obama administration’s Russia “collusion” investigation. Among other things, the report will identify Obama-appointed diplomats who worked with partisan operatives close to Hillary Clinton to help ex-British spy Christopher Steele compile the dossier, sources say.

“Those are the first two phases” of Nunes’ multipart inquiry, a senior investigator said. “In phase three, the involvement of the intelligence community will come into sharper focus.”

The aide, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said Nunes will focus on Brennan as well as President Obama’s first CIA director, Leon Panetta, along with the former president’s intelligence czar, James Clapper, and national security adviser, Susan Rice, and security adviser-turned U.N. ambassador Samantha Power, among other intelligence officials.

“John Brennan did more than anyone to promulgate the dirty dossier,” the investigator said. “He politicized and effectively weaponized what was false intelligence against Trump.”

Attempts to reach Brennan for comment were unsuccessful.

Several Capitol Hill sources say Brennan, a fiercely loyal Obama appointee, talked up the dossier to Democratic leaders, as well as the press, during the campaign. They say he also fed allegations about Trump-Russia contacts directly to the FBI, while pressuring the bureau to conduct an investigation of several Trump campaign figures starting in the summer of 2016.

Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort was wiretapped in addition to Trump adviser Carter Page during the campaign. (Page has not been charged with a crime. Manafort was recently indicted for financial crimes unrelated to the Moscow “collusion” activities alleged in the dossier.)

On Aug. 25, 2016, for example, the CIA chief gave an unusual private briefing to then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in which he told Reid the Russians were backing Trump and that the FBI would have to take the lead in an investigation because the FBI is the federal agency in charge of domestic intelligence and, unlike the CIA, can spy on U.S. citizens.

Two days after Brennan’s special briefing, Reid fired off a letter to then-FBI Director James Comey demanding he open an investigation targeting “individuals tied to Trump” to determine if they coordinated with the Russian government “to influence our election.”

“The Trump campaign has employed a number of individuals with significant and disturbing ties to Russia and the Kremlin,” the then-top Democrat in the Senate added in his two-page letter.

Reid then alluded to Page as one of those compromised individuals and repeated an unproven charge from the dossier that Page had met with two Kremlin officials in Moscow in July 2016 to discuss removing U.S. sanctions on Russia. Page has repeatedly denied the allegation under oath, swearing he never even met the Russian officials named in the dossier.

“Any such meetings should be investigated,” Reid asserted.

Less than two months later, Comey signed an application for a surveillance warrant to monitor Page’s emails, text messages, phone conversations and residence.

Unsatisfied with the progress of Comey’s investigation, Reid released an open letter to the FBI chief in late October 2016 accusing him of sitting on evidence. Reid told Comey that from his communications with “other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity.”

Congressional investigators say that the “explosive information” Reid referred to was the false or unverified claims in the Clinton-funded dossier — which the sources say were passed along by Brennan. They add that Brennan gave more than one briefing.

After Trump won the election, sources say, the CIA director sought to “weaponize” the dossier’s wild accusations against the president-elect.

In early January, just weeks before Trump was inaugurated, investigators say Brennan saw to it that the contents from the dossier were attached to an official daily intelligence briefing for Obama. The special classified briefing was then leaked to the major Washington media, allowing them to use the presidential briefing to justify the publication of claims they had up to that point not been able to substantiate and had been reluctant to run.

CNN broke the news that the dossier — described as “classified documents” — had been attached to the briefing report by the CIA, and had been given to the president. The top-level credence that the government was placing in the dossier gave prominent newspapers, including the Washington Post and New York Times, justification to follow suit.

In addition, BuzzFeed published 35 pages of the dossier in full. (The Internet news outlet was recently sued by Trump campaign lawyer Michael Cohen, whom the dossier accused of conspiring with the Kremlin to pay Russian hackers to steal Clinton campaign emails. It’s one of several libel and defamation lawsuits tied to the dossier.)

At the time, the Washington Post was assured by Obama intelligence officials that “the sources involved in the [dossier’s] reporting were credible enough to warrant inclusion of their claims in the highly classified [presidential] report.” Months later in public testimony, however, Brennan said the dossier and its sources were not credible enough to incorporate the information in a separate January 2017 intelligence report on Russian election interference publicly released by the administration. The published unclassified version of the report nonetheless echoes the dossier’s central assertion that Moscow meddled in the election to help Trump.

Brennan later swore the dossier did not “in any way” factor into the CIA’s assessment that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump. However, congressional investigators suggest a still-classified version of the January 2017 intelligence report contradicts his claim. Also in his May 2017 testimony, Brennan swore he had no idea who commissioned the dossier.

CIA veterans say Brennan was the most politicized director in the agency’s history and was responsible for much of the anti-Trump bias from the intelligence community during the campaign and transition period.

Former CIA field operations officer Gene Coyle, a 30-year agency veteran who served under Brennan, said he was “known as the greatest sycophant in the history of the CIA, and a supporter of Hillary Clinton before the election.”

“I find it hard to put any real credence in anything that the man says,” he added.

Coyle noted that Brennan broke with his predecessors who stayed out of elections. Several weeks before the vote, he said, “Brennan made it very clear that he was a supporter of candidate Clinton, hoping he would be rewarded with being kept on in her administration.” (Brennan is a liberal Democrat. In fact, at the height of the Cold War in 1976, he voted for a Communist Party candidate for president.)

What’s more, his former deputy at the CIA, Mike Morell, who formed a consulting firm with longtime Clinton aide and campaign adviser Philippe Reines, even came out in early August 2016 and publicly endorsed her in the New York Times, while claiming Trump was an “unwitting agent” of Moscow.

“In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation,” he claimed. “My training as an intelligence officer taught me to call it as I see it. This is what I did for the CIA. This is what I am doing now. Our nation will be much safer with Hillary Clinton as president.”

Reid repeated Morell’s allegation against Trump in his August 2016 letter to Comey.

Career U.S. intelligence officials say Morell, like Brennan, was personally invested in a Clinton victory.

Morell “had aspirations of being CIA director if she had won,” said former FBI counterintelligence official I.C. Smith, whose service overlapped with Brennan’s.

Investigators are trying to learn if the Clinton campaign shared, through Reines, the early memos on the dossier it was paying for with Morrell before he wrote his Times op-ed.

Morell could not be reached for comment. But he pushed back hard last week against Nunes releasing his memo exposing the FBI’s reliance on the dossier for Trump wiretaps, which he argued “did not have to happen. It undermines the credibility of the FBI in the public’s eyes, and with no justification in my view.”

“What happened here underscores the partisanship and the dysfunction of a very important committee in Congress, and that does not serve Congress well. It doesn’t serve the intelligence community, and it doesn’t serve the country well,” Morell continued earlier this week in an interview with CBS News, where he now works as a “senior national security contributor.”

Sources say Brennan is aware that the House Intelligence Committee is targeting him in its wide-ranging investigation of the dossier and investigative and intelligence abuses related to it, and that Nunes plans to call him and other former Obama administration officials before the panel to question them based on newly obtained documents and information.

Last week, perhaps not coincidentally, Brennan signed a contract with NBC News and MSNBC to be their “senior national security and intelligence analyst.”

On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Brennan laced into Nunes for releasing the memo revealing FBI surveillance abuses related to the dossier, claiming the head of the intelligence panel has “abused the office of the chairmanship.”

“It really underscores just how partisan Mr. Nunes has been,” Brennan charged.

In the interview, Brennan claimed he first learned of the existence of the dossier “in late summer of 2016, when there were some individuals from the various U.S. news outlets who asked me about my familiarity with it. And I had heard just snippets about it.”

He further contended that he had neither seen nor read the dossier until a month after the election.

“I did not know what was in there,” Brennan said. “I did not see it until later in that year, I think it was in December.”

Brennan also insisted he did not know who was pulling the strings on the research that went into the dossier.

“I was unaware of the provenance of it as well as what was in it,” he said, and he reasserted that “it did not play any role whatsoever in the intelligence community assessment that was done.”

Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, is also coming under scrutiny for his role in the dossier.

He joined Brennan in giving Obama a two-page summary of the dossier memos during the presidential briefing in January 2017. Days later, Clapper expressed “profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press,” and misleadingly referred to the dossier as a “private security company document.”

The intelligence committee plans to press Clapper to find out if he knew at the time that, in fact, the document was political opposition research underwritten by the Clinton campaign, and whether any of the leaks to the media came from his office.

“I do not believe the leaks came from within the IC [intelligence community],” he maintained at the time, adding that “we did not rely upon [the dossier] in any way for our conclusion” on Russian interference.

In October 2016, during the heat of the campaign, Clapper issued a public report declaring that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime directed the cyberattacks on Clinton campaign emails, echoing memos Steele was delivering at the time to the Clinton campaign.

A year later, after it was finally revealed in the national media that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded the research that went into the notorious dossier, Clapper insisted it “doesn’t matter who paid for it.”

“It’s what the dossier said and the extent to which it was — it’s corroborated or not. We had some concerns about it from the standpoint of its sourcing, which we couldn’t corroborate,” Clapper added last October in an interview with CNN.

He went on to strongly suggest that the intelligence assessment report he issued with Brennan, which concluded the Kremlin not only hacked the Democratic campaign but did so specifically to put Trump in the White House, was based on “some of the substantive content of the dossier.”

“But at the same time, some of the substantive content, not all of it, but some of the substantive content of the dossier, we were able to corroborate in our Intelligence Community Assessment from other sources, which we had very high confidence of,” Clapper said.

Investigators say Nunes intends to drill down on exactly who those “other sources” are now that his committee has learned that top officials at both the FBI and Justice Department relied on a Yahoo! News article as their additional sourcing to corroborate the dossier allegations they cited to obtain Trump campaign wiretap warrants — even though it turns out the main source for the Yahoo! story was merely the dossier’s author, Steele, who was disguised as “a Western intelligence source.”

Clapper, who recently signed his own media deal, joining CNN as a paid “contributor,” bashed Nunes on the network and suggested the release of future reports could endanger the intelligence community’s mission. He said his release of the FBI memo was “political” and an “egregious” betrayal of “others in the intelligence community who have a lot at stake here with the whole FISA [surveillance] process.”

Facebook Deleted 538 Million Fake Accounts in 2018

Facebook removed 700 million in 2017. Staggering numbers.

So much for reliance on artificial intelligence software programs or high praise for them in pinpointing fake accounts. Is it any wonder what Facebook does to accounts, links and news on the platform and what shows up on your timeline or in trending? Perhaps we are now to rely on the new 10,000 Facebook editors. Consider, during the first quarter of 2018, Facebook deleted 865.8 million posts, the majority of which were spam, according to the report. Facebook also removed 28.8 million posts showing everything from nudity that violated its community standards to graphic violence and terrorist propaganda, the report said.

It is interesting that media has not fully responded, as journalists use Facebook trending items to determine lead stories. Perhaps headlines will change or perhaps not so much.

We’re committed to doing more to keep you safe and protect your privacy. So that we can all get back to what made Facebook good in the first place: friends. Because when this place does what it was built for, we all get a little closer.

Facebook has been running ads in markets still working to regain trust and still working to create new people relationships with each other. Users still don’t have a full understanding of user standards and what violations really mean.

Facebook’s first community standards enforcement report says the social media giant disabled 583 million fake accounts in the first quarter of 2018, relying heavily on artificial intelligence.

The report, released Tuesday, aims to show how Facebook is taking action against content that violates its standards. The staggering number of fake accounts it disabled in the period fell from 694 million in the fourth quarter of 2017. The report didn’t reveal earlier data.

The first-quarter report also said Facebook acted on 836 million pieces of spam content, 2.5 million pieces of hate speech content, 1.9 million pieces of terrorist propaganda content, 21 million pieces of adult nudity and sexual activity content and 3.4 million pieces of graphic violence content.

Facebook executives vowed to increase transparency in the wake of recent controversies involving the spread of fake news and the and the unauthorized harvesting of personal data.

“It’s a good move and it’s a long time coming,” Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The New York Times of the new report. “But it’s also frustrating because we’ve known that this has needed to happen for a long time. We need more transparency about how Facebook identifies content, and what it removes going forward.”

The report said Facebook increasingly relies on AI to flag unsavory content. AI tools detected 98.5 percent of the fake accounts that were shut down, according to the report, and almost all of the spam content acted upon.

“Technology isn’t going to solve all of it, but we will make progress,” Guy Rosen, who heads Facebook’s team policing community standards, told The Financial Times.

The report acknowledged that Facebook’s metrics tracking its response to content that violates standards are still being refined.

“This is the start of the journey and not the end of the journey and we’re trying to be as open as we can,” said Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Facebook a day earlier announced it had suspended about 200 apps while it investigates whether any of them contributed to the misuse of data.

Omar Mateen to Larry Nasser, Can the FBI be Fixed?

When agents fail 4 polygraphs and are still on the payroll with security clearance, is the FBI working well? When agents create fake Facebook accounts to leak information, are things working well at the Bureau? When agents fail to stop Omar Mateen, the San Bernardino, California terrorist, are things broken at the FBI? What about the early complaints by parents to the FBI about the rapist/molester Larry Nasser and not getting a call for over a year? Conditions are the Bureau good?

The Michael Horowitz Inspector General report is due at any time. What is unclear is how the FBI will be summarized and why? Was there a full mission change to find domestic terrorists over robbery cases? Did RICO cases get sidelined for the sake of sex traffickers or narcotic cases?

Inspector General reports provide the reason for the investigation and the recommendations to cure the systems. Will that be the case when it comes to hacking over locating foreign spies in our country? Is crime in America so overwhelming that the FBI cannot keep pace and local law enforcement is lagging behind as well including the fact that technology is advancing such that cases should be easier?

You be the judge as you read the following:

The FBI Is in Crisis. It’s Worse Than You Think

TIME: In normal times, the televisions are humming at the FBI’s 56 field offices nationwide, piping in the latest news as agents work their investigations. But these days, some agents say, the TVs are often off to avoid the crush of bad stories about the FBI itself. The bureau, which is used to making headlines for nabbing crooks, has been grabbing the spotlight for unwanted reasons: fired leaders, texts between lovers and, most of all, attacks by President Trump. “I don’t care what channel it’s on,” says Tom O’Connor, a veteran investigator in Washington who leads the FBI Agents Association. “All you hear is negative stuff about the FBI … It gets depressing.”

Many view Trump’s attacks as self-serving: he has called the renowned agency an “embarrassment to our country” and its investigations of his business and political dealings a “witch hunt.” But as much as the bureau’s roughly 14,000 special agents might like to tune out the news, internal and external reports have found lapses throughout the agency, and longtime observers, looking past the partisan haze, see a troubling picture: something really is wrong at the FBI.

The Justice Department’s Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, will soon release a much-anticipated assessment of Democratic and Republican charges that officials at the FBI interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign. That year-long probe, sources familiar with it tell TIME, is expected to come down particularly hard on former FBI director James Comey, who is currently on a high-profile book tour. It will likely find that Comey breached Justice Department protocols in a July 5, 2016, press conference when he criticized Hillary Clinton for using a private email server as Secretary of State even as he cleared her of any crimes, the sources say. The report is expected to also hit Comey for the way he reopened the Clinton email probe less than two weeks before the election, the sources say.

The report closely follows an earlier one in April by Horowitz, which showed that the ousted deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, had lied to the bureau’s internal investigations branch to cover up a leak he orchestrated about Clinton’s family foundation less than two weeks before the election. (The case has since been referred to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., for potential prosecution.) Another IG report in March found that FBI retaliation against internal whistle-blowers was continuing despite years of bureau pledges to fix the problem. Last fall, Horowitz found that the FBI wasn’t adequately investigating “high-risk” employees who failed polygraph tests.

There have been other painful, more public failures as well: missed opportunities to prevent mass shootings that go beyond the much-publicized overlooked warnings in the Parkland, Fla., school killings; an anguishing delay in the sexual-molestation probe into Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar; and evidence of misconduct by agents in the aftermath of standoffs with armed militias in Nevada and Oregon. FBI agents are facing criminal charges ranging from obstruction to leaking classified material. And then there’s potentially the widest-reaching failure of all: the FBI’s miss of the Russian influence operation against the 2016 election, which went largely undetected for more than two years.

In the course of two dozen interviews for this story, agents and others expressed concern that the tumult is threatening the cooperation of informants, local and state police officials, and allies overseas. Even those who lived through past crises say the current one is more damaging. “We’ve seen ups and downs, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Robert Anderson, a senior official at the FBI who retired in 2015.

The FBI’s crisis of credibility appears to have seeped into the jury room. The number of convictions in FBI-led investigations has declined in each of the last five years, dropping nearly 11% over that period, according to a TIME analysis of data obtained from the Justice Department by researchers at Syracuse University. “We’ve already seen where the bad guys and witnesses look at those FBI credentials, and it might not carry the same weight anymore,” says O’Connor.

Indeed, public support for the FBI has plunged. A PBS NewsHour survey in April showed a 10-point drop–from 71% to 61%–in the prior two months among Americans who thought the FBI was “just trying to do its job” and an 8-point jump–from 23% to 31%–among those who thought it was “biased against the Trump Administration.”

The FBI, of course, continues to do good work. On April 25, local authorities in Sacramento and the FBI announced the dramatic arrest of the Golden State Killer. That same day it helped bust 39 people in Pennsylvania in a cocaine-trafficking investigation, 14 prison employees in South Carolina in a bribery case and two men in New Jersey in a $5.3 million tax-evasion probe. Assistant FBI Director William F. Sweeney Jr., who runs the New York field office and oversaw the April 9 raid against Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, says his agents’ response to the turmoil has been to “double down and [say], ‘Hey, we’re gonna keep on moving.’”

Some question whether the FBI has gotten too big and has been asked to do too many things. After 9/11, then FBI director Robert Mueller, who is now the special counsel leading the Russia probe, made massive new investments in counterterrorism and intelligence, shifting resources and investigative focus from white collar crime and bank robberies.

Many of the bureau’s woes developed on Comey’s 3½-year watch. They extend beyond the most visible controversies, like the Clinton email and Russia investigations, to his costly confrontation with Apple over unlocking an iPhone used by one of the terrorists in the San Bernardino, Calif., shooting in 2015, and beyond. Critics say Comey’s penchant for high-profile moral fights has, ironically, undermined the bureau’s reputation. Trump himself has used that line of argument to challenge the FBI.

Democrats have questioned the integrity of the bureau as well, with Clinton and her aides claiming Comey and the FBI helped tip the election to Trump. But the biggest difference between past crises and the current one, according to virtually everyone interviewed for this article, is the President. Trump has continually attacked the integrity of the institution and its leaders, alleging not just incompetence but bad faith in the commission of justice. Ronald Hosko, who retired in 2014 after 30 years at the bureau, compares the moment to a wildfire, saying Trump “is either the spark that creates the flames, or he’s standing there with a can of gas to stoke the flames.”

The bureau’s current director, Christopher Wray, recently said his first priority is to “try to bring a sense of calm and stability back to the bureau.” But the FBI is facing one of the greatest tests of its 110 years. In the coming months, it must fix a litany of internal problems, fend off outside attacks on its trustworthiness and pursue investigations touching on a sitting President, at the same time a growing number of Americans are asking themselves: Can we trust the FBI?

Last May, McCabe, then the FBI’s deputy director, sat down at the table in his seventh-floor office for a meeting with two agents from the inspections division. The agents had some questions about the Clinton Foundation leak just before the election. It was a quick meeting. McCabe, an FBI veteran who rose through the ranks over a 21-year career, told them he had “no idea” where the leak came from. The agents left after just five minutes or so, according to the Inspector General’s April 13 report.

McCabe had offered that same basic assurance months earlier to his boss, then director Comey, investigators said, and had angrily lit into FBI officials under him, suggesting the Clinton leak had come from their offices and telling one senior agent in Washington to “get his house in order.” But as it turned out, McCabe knew exactly where the leak had come from. He personally authorized it, Horowitz’s investigators found, to counter charges that he favored Clinton. (His wife received $467,500 from the PAC of a Clinton ally, then Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, in a failed 2015 bid for state office.)

The McCabe findings have shaken the FBI. The bureau has massive power, and as a result, it has strict rules. Lying to investigators is considered a dire breach in an organization built on trust. The referral to the U.S. Attorney’s office, which emerged a week after the report was released, could result in charges against McCabe of making a false sworn statement. He has challenged the findings, disputing even the most basic elements, like how many people were in the room. The IG said it did not find many of his objections credible, with some elements contradicted by notes taken contemporaneously by an agent. McCabe previously called his firing part of a “war on the FBI” and the Russia investigation. But viewed against the backdrop of other Horowitz reports, McCabe’s alleged rule-breaking looks like part of a much larger problem.

In September, Horowitz found that bureau investigators had allowed employees with dubious polygraph results to keep their top-secret clearances for months or even years, posing “potential risks to U.S. national security.” In one instance, an FBI IT specialist with top-secret security clearance failed four polygraph tests and admitted to having created a fictitious Facebook account to communicate with a foreign national, but received no disciplinary action for that. In late 2016, Horowitz found that the FBI was getting information it shouldn’t have had access to when it used controversial parts of the Patriot Act to obtain business records in terrorism and counterintelligence cases.

Just as troubling are recent FBI missteps not yet under the IG’s microscope. At 2:31 p.m. on Jan. 5, the FBI’s round-the-clock tip center in West Virginia received a chilling phone call. The caller gave her name and said she was close to the family of an 18-year-old in Parkland, Fla., named Nikolas Cruz. Over 13 minutes, she said Cruz had posted photos of rifles he owned and animals he mutilated and that he wanted “to kill people.” She listed his Instagram accounts and suggested the FBI check for itself, saying she was worried about the thought of his “getting into a school and just shooting the place up,” according to a transcript of the call.

The FBI specialist checked Cruz’s name against a database and found that another tipster had reported 3½ months earlier that a “Nikolas Cruz” posted a comment on his YouTube channel saying, “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” But neither tip was passed on to the FBI field agents in Miami or local officials in Parkland. After Cruz allegedly killed 17 people with an AR-15 rifle at his old school just six weeks later, the bureau admitted that it had dropped the ball and ordered a full review. “You look at this and say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” says Anderson, the former FBI official.

The Parkland shooting was only the latest in a string of devastating misses. After Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people at the nightclub Pulse in Orlando in June 2016, the FBI said it had investigated him twice before on terrorism suspicions, but shut the inquiries for lack of evidence. The year before, after Dylann Roof shot to death nine African-American parishioners at a South Carolina church, the FBI acknowledged that lapses in its gun background-check system allowed him to illegally buy the .45-caliber handgun he used in the massacre. And in 2011, the FBI received a tip from Russian intelligence that one of the Boston Marathon bombers had become radicalized and was planning an overseas trip to join radical Islamic groups. The FBI in Boston investigated him but found no “nexus” to terrorism.

FBI agents at the damaged rear wall of the Pulse nightclub, where Omar Mateen killed 49 people in June 2016

FBI agents at the damaged rear wall of the Pulse nightclub, where Omar Mateen killed 49 people in June 2016
Joe Raedle—Getty Images

The Orlando shooting provoked more second-guessing in late March, when the shooter’s widow, Noor Salman, was acquitted on charges of aiding and abetting him and obstructing justice. The jury foreman pointed to inconsistencies in the FBI’s accounts of the disputed admissions that agents said Salman had made, according to the Orlando Sentinel. The judge also scolded the government after an FBI agent contradicted the government’s earlier claims that Salman and Mateen had cased the club.

The concerns about FBI testimony in a major terrorist prosecution underscore a larger question: Are people less likely to believe what the bureau says these days? In January, a federal judge threw out all the criminal charges against renegade Nevada cattleman Cliven Bundy, his two sons and a supporter who had been in an armed standoff over unpaid grazing fees. Judge Gloria Navarro accused the government of “outrageous” and “flagrant” misconduct, citing failures by both prosecutors and the FBI to produce at least 1,000 pages of required documents. The judge said the FBI misplaced–or “perhaps hid”–a thumb drive revealing the existence of snipers and a surveillance camera at the site of the standoff.

A related case in Oregon, growing out of the 2016 takeover of a wildlife refuge by Bundy’s sons and their followers, has not gone well for the FBI either. An agent at the scene, W. Joseph Astarita, is now charged with five criminal counts after prosecutors say he falsely denied shooting twice at an occupation leader who was fatally shot by police, who said he appeared to be reaching for his handgun during a roadside encounter. The Bundy sons and five supporters who helped in the takeover were found not guilty of conspiracy and weapons charges, in another jarring setback for the government.

Some legal experts and defense advocates see the string of recent not guilty verdicts as a sign that jurors and judges are less inclined to take what the FBI says in court at face value. Data examined by TIME support that conclusion. The number of convictions in FBI-led investigations dropped last year for the fifth consecutive year–from 11,461 in 2012 to 10,232, according to Syracuse University data, which was obtained under Freedom of Information Act requests.

Moreover, TIME’s analysis shows a surprisingly low rate of success for the thousands of cases the FBI investigates and sends to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. Over that same time period, the Justice Department has ultimately won convictions in fewer than half the cases the FBI referred for prosecution, with a conviction rate of 47% last year, the data showed. That fell well below the average of 72% for all agencies. Prosecutors themselves have rejected many of the FBI’s referrals before they ever got to court. The bureau’s low success rate in these cases has remained largely unchanged in recent years.

Federal prosecutors still win the bulk of the thousands of cases they choose to bring based on FBI investigations. Justice Department spokesman Ian Prior says a variety of factors could play into the drop in prosecutions and convictions over the last five years, including “de-emphasizing” some crimes under Obama-era policies and cutbacks in prosecutors in recent years. Prior says that “judging the performance of the FBI based on a minuscule sample of cherry-picked cases” ignores its thousands of annual convictions.

Gina Nichols, a nurse in Minnesota, says she never had strong impressions one way or the other about the FBI until her daughter Maggie Nichols, who was a member of the national gymnastics team, reported three years ago that team physician Larry Nassar had molested her. Gina waited anxiously for the FBI to contact her and interview Maggie. But no one did so for nearly a year as the case languished among different FBI field offices in Indianapolis, Detroit and Los Angeles. Nassar is believed to have molested dozens of additional victims over the course of that year. “It makes you sick,” Gina tells TIME. “I have a child who was sexually abused for 2½ years by an Olympic doctor, and the FBI did nothing.”

The FBI has opened an internal inquiry to determine why the Nassar investigations appear to have dragged on for so long. John Manly, a Southern California lawyer representing many of the women, says he is angry that no one from the FBI has contacted the victims to explain the delay. “Knowing that the best law-enforcement agency in the world knew exactly what he was up to and did nothing–I can’t explain that to them,” Manly says. “You’ve got people who were really hurt here, so fix it,” he says.

Perhaps the easiest problems to address are the internal lapses. Experts say putting assets and management attention back to work on cyber, counterintelligence and traditional crime after Mueller shifted them to counterterrorism would help. “There’s an overextension of the mission,” says Brian Levin, a professor of criminal justice at California State University, San Bernardino, who has worked with the FBI. Most of Horowitz’s reports include measures the FBI can take to address their problems, including stricter rules for investigating polygraph test failures and training to protect whistle-blowers.

A failure of imagination is harder to fix. Mueller’s Russia probe has found that Moscow’s operation against the 2016 election first got under way in 2014, but the FBI failed to grasp the scope and danger of what was unfolding. The bureau missed the significance of the damaging 2015 hack of the DNC database. And when the Russian operation began to heat up in the summer of 2016, the FBI was always a step behind the Russians, struggling to understand intelligence reports they were getting about possible connections between Moscow and Trump aides. The bureau also sat on the disputed “dossier” prepared by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.

A report released on April 27 by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee found that the FBI was slow to confront the election meddling, especially in its failure to notify U.S. victims of Russian hacking quickly enough. The committee also charged that the bureau’s decision to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was influenced by politics. At the same time, the GOP has pointed to text messages between FBI special agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, which were critical of Trump–as well as many Democrats–to argue the bureau is fundamentally biased.

FBI Director Wray says the bureau has started “specific activities” to prevent election meddling by Moscow, but outsiders worry that the U.S. remains vulnerable this fall and beyond.

The most important thing the FBI can do to fix itself? Follow its own rules. In his handling of the Clinton email probe ahead of the 2016 election, Comey acted without telling the Justice Department what he planned to do. Comey is expected to come under fire in the upcoming IG report for breaking with Justice Department rules and norms by assuming authority usually held by prosecutors and speaking in public about a case that did not produce criminal charges, sources with knowledge of the report tell TIME. He will likely also be criticized for weighing in so close to the election in a way that could impact the outcome, sources familiar with the investigation say.

On his book tour, Comey has defended his decisions as the best way out of a bad situation. Facing what he called “a series of no-win decisions,” Comey says he did what he thought was necessary and transparent to protect the integrity of both the FBI and the legal process in such a high-profile case.

As he faces the crises at the FBI, Wray has told his senior aides to “keep calm and tackle hard.” Asked if recent misconduct cases concern Wray, FBI spokeswoman Jacqueline Maguire said the bureau’s 36,000 employees “are held to the highest standards of conduct–but as in any large organization, there may be occasions when an employee exercises poor judgment or engages in misconduct.” While she declined to discuss specific cases, Maguire said claims of misconduct are “taken seriously [and] investigated thoroughly,” leading to discipline when needed.

At FBI headquarters, agents and supervisors say they are keeping their heads down and focusing on their investigations. But the building is literally crumbling around them–Comey kept in his office a slab of concrete that had fallen off the side. Designs for a new complex were scrapped in February. Visible across Pennsylvania Avenue from the main entrance, with J. Edgar Hoover’s tarnished name above it, is the gleaming, gold-plated sign on the newly renovated Trump International Hotel.

Trump’s attacks on the FBI have been filled with inaccuracies and innuendo, wrongly claiming on Twitter, for instance, that McCabe was in charge of the Clinton email investigation. Trump makes a point of praising rank-and-file agents, but his punches have landed inside the FBI and out. Some worry the damage may take years to repair. “I fear Trump’s relentless attacks on the institution are having an effect on the public’s confidence in the FBI,” says Matthew S. Axelrod, a senior Justice Department official in the Obama Administration.

Mueller may play an outsize role in how his old agency gets through the current crisis. If the special counsel finds that Russia did collude with members of the Trump campaign–the central question in his investigation–and any perpetrators are charged and found guilty in court, it would rebut Trump’s charges of a “witch hunt.” If Mueller finds no evidence of collusion, or declines to make it public, it would open the door for Trump and his campaign to paint the FBI as a band of partisan hacks with a reputation, as he has tweeted, “in tatters.”

There may be no immediate way to fix a place with as many missions and masters as the FBI. One official, asked what it would take for the FBI to move past all the controversy, paused and said simply, “Time.” Many hope that the extraordinary confluence of events that drew the FBI into the 2016 election will prove to be, as Comey called it, “a 500-year flood” that won’t repeat itself anytime soon.

Others are doubtful. Jeffrey Danik, a retired FBI agent in Florida who now works with whistle-blowers at the bureau, blames the state of affairs on “a severe lack of leadership” and transparency at headquarters in owning up to recent mistakes. Those damaging failures, he says, “have just about pushed our incredible organization over the brink.” For now, everyone inside and out who cares about the reliability of law enforcement in America is left hoping that the bureau has at least started on the road back.