At the Daily Wire, Ryan Saavedra postulates a breakthrough in DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigation into alleged FISA abuse against the Trump campaign. Saavedra reports that “at least one witness has started to cooperate in the investigation.” Fox News also reports that an Obama administration official has flipped.
Saavedra suggests that the official most likely to be cooperating with Horowitz’s investigation (which in turn, as I understand it, is collaborating with the Durham probe that was ordered by Attorney General William Barr) is Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec.
We wrote about Kavalec’s role in the Russiagate investigation in May. The relevant point is that Kavalec knew that Christopher Steele’s Hillary-financed “dossier” on Donald Trump was a fraud in early October 2016, before the Department of Justice misled the FISA court in order to get a surveillance order on Carter Page:
In her typed summary, Kavalec wrote that Steele told her the Russians had constructed a “technical/human operation run out of Moscow targeting the election” that recruited emigres in the United States to “do hacking and recruiting.”
She quoted Steele as saying, “Payments to those recruited are made out of the Russian Consulate in Miami,” according to a copy of her summary memo obtained under open records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United. Kavalec bluntly debunked that assertion in a bracketed comment: “It is important to note that there is no Russian consulate in Miami.”
Kavalec also pointed out that Steele was politically motivated, as demonstrated by his Election Day deadline. (No surprise there, since Hillary Clinton was his client.) Kavalec passed her concerns about Steele’s good faith up the chain of command–again, before DOJ’s FISA application, which swore that Steele was “reliable” and claimed, falsely, that DOJ was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to him. Those assertions were made again and again over a period of months as the FBI and DOJ repeatedly went before the FISA court to renew their surveillance of Page, who must be America’s most innocent man, since he was never charged with anything.
If Kavalec has indeed flipped, how significant is it? It’s hard to say. Her notes and emails are damning enough; the question is whether she has much to add to them. She might have had conversations with fellow Obama administration officials about Steele that would definitively put the lie to the administration’s FISA applications. More likely, she can simply add foundation and context to the written record.
I have always thought it unlikely that any Obama administration officials–John Brennan, James Comey, Andrew McCabe and the whole rogues’ gallery–will pay a serious price for their meddling in the 2016 election and, worse, their effort to use fake intelligence to disable the incoming Trump administration. But we can always hope that someday, justice will prevail.
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