Bad News From the New York Office

Rogue Agents.

Some discouraging news for those who are waiting to learn the truth about how rogue agents from the FBI's New York field office manipulated Director Comey into publicly revealing the bogus "reopening" of the Hillary Clinton email investigation in October 2016, which has looked statistically like the news story that finally tipped the presidential election to Donald Trump; it looks like it's not going to happen.

Namely, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General has issued a report on its investigation of the matter—

allegations that FBI employees improperly disclosed non-public information regarding the FBI’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. FBI policies strictly limit the employees who are authorized to speak to the media, and require all other employees to coordinate with or obtain approval from the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA)... 

—and it looks like they pretty much couldn't find out what happened, or decided they couldn't, because in the first place, um, unfortunately, some phones disappeared. OIG was collecting texts and electronic messages from agents fingered as suspicious by "senior FBI witnesses" and found that there was a gap in the record that the bureau couldn't account for. OIG then proceeded to impound the phones of the agents in question but couldn't get them all:

After the FBI informed the OIG of the missing text messages for the four employees, the OIG requested to take physical custody of the FBI-issued cellular phones for these employees. The OIG received Samsung Galaxy S7 devices that had been assigned to the four employees, and recovered text messages from these phones for the early 2017 time period.7 However, the FBI could not locate the employees’ previously assigned Samsung Galaxy S5 devices, which would have had text messages for the relevant time periods in 2016. Accordingly, the OIG was unable to review the 2016 text messages for four of the employees identified by senior FBI witnesses as being potential sources of disclosures of non-public information in 2016. 

And none of the messages that they were able to review had any evidence of those agents transmitting non-public information to the press. So it looks like either

1. they never transmitted non-public information to the press on their cell phones, or
2. the ones who transmitted non-public information to the press on their cell phones must have been the ones whose texts were missing from the FBI's record and whose Galaxy S5s turned out to be missing too.

What a coincidence, huh? But what are you gonna do?

Then, when they interviewed Rudolph Giuliani (in a volunteer appearance, which I think means not under oath) over his televised statements of 26 October 2016 that

“I think he’s got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.”

and on 28 October, after the news of the reopened Hillary investigation broke, that he had been hearing "rumors" according to which he had been hearing the same story from

“former agents, and even from a few active agents, who obviously don’t want to identify themselves.”

Giuliani explained to the OIG that in fact he had not heard the story from anybody,

“[Director] Comey’s statements were a shock to me. I had no foreknowledge of any of them.” 

and had had no contact whatever with any active FBI agents on the subject; when he said "a few active agents" he hadn't actually meant "a few active agents", but rather 

retired FBI agents who were still actively working in security and consulting

as one does, when one has forgotten that words have any meaning.

To its credit, the OIG was not totally satisfied at this point, and asked the FBI to follow up on the question of whether any of the relevant FBI agents had been in telephonic contact with Giuliani on their FBI-issued devices during the relevant period. And the FBI came back to say that four of them had, in fact, engaged in calls with numbers associated with the law office where Giuliani was a partner at the time. But

The OIG determined that the numbers used by the FBI were for the general telephone line for the New York office of the law firm at which Giuliani was a partner during the relevant time frames, and two other general telephone lines for businesses at which Giuliani had not been affiliated since at least 2007. The telephone numbers attributed by the FBI to Giuliani were not, therefore, specific to Giuliani. Accordingly, the purported investigative leads provided by the FBI based on alleged FBI employee contacts with Giuliani were inaccurate. 

This is a little confusing, because he belonged to two different law firms over the relevant period, I think, the Houston firm then known as Bracewell Giuliani, which he actually founded in 2005, and left in January 2016, and the vast firm of Greenberg Traurig, which he and Michael Mukasey immediately joined at that point. But I think the main sticking point for the OIG seems to have been that you couldn't tell who the four FBI agents were talking to on the Greenberg Traurig general phone line. Maybe they were all having affairs with the receptionist. 

And of course it's still possible that they spoke to Giuliani on those missing S5s. Just saying. But I hafta say, the language used by the OIG here is not truthful—they don't know whether the leads were "inaccurate" or not. They know only that they were unable to determine the truth. And I appreciate the rigor of the OIG not going into anything they couldn't prove and sticking to their mandate of investigating only FBI agents who were active (in the ordinary sense of the word) during the period, but to me as an outsider everything in this story is as fishy as it ever was, even considerably fishier.

In other news, in a genuine coincidence, Giuliani's and Trump's pal Jim Kallstrom, the man who really was a retired FBI agent still actively working in security and consulting, and the most likely organizer of  that October surprise form the FBI's New York field office in which FBI agents and Giuliani brought Hillary down

—last sighted here taking a million dollars from Trump for his "charity" in January 2016, in the event for which Letitia James busted the Trump Foundation—an event he staged only to distract attention from a candidates' debate he was afraid to show up for, and a donation he made only after he got caught (by David Fahrenthold) making no donations at all—

died in July, at 78, of a "rare blood cancer", so we'll never know his story at all. I don't want to be a Debbie Downer, but if there was ever a smoking gun in this case it was a Samsung phone that got ditched a long time ago and we're never going to see it again. Still, we've always got narratology.

H/t @j_consolidation for the tips.