(Credit: Conservative Treehouse)
“A former Justice Department official who is discussed throughout the inspector general’s report on FISA abuse added his name Monday to a petition calling on William Barr to resign as attorney general.
David Laufman, who served as chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence and export control section through 2018, said Monday that he joined more than 2,000 former Justice Department employees who signed the petition, which was started by the anti-Trump activist group, Protect Democracy.
(…) Laufman, who appears frequently on MSNBC and CNN, often to criticize the Trump administration, played a key role in both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia probe.
He conducted interviews alongside disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok during the Clinton email investigation. Laufman and Strzok interviewed Clinton herself July 2, 2016. They also conducted interviews with Clinton aides Human Abedin and Cheryl Mills in which the pair appear to have made inconsistent statements about their knowledge of Clinton’s private email server.
(DOJ IG Report)
The Justice Department inspector general’s report on FISA abuse said Laufman helped arrange a key meeting for FBI and Justice Department officials that would raise significant concerns about the reliability of Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose dossier the FBI used to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Carter Page.
Donald Trump issues a directive to the intelligence community to cooperate with William Barr’s review of the Trump-Russia investigation and David Laufman responds to that directive on the Maddow Show, May 24, 2019. (Credit: MSNBC)
The inspector general report said Laufman arranged a meeting in January 2017 for Steele’s main source for information in the dossier. Laufman sat in on part of the interview.
Steele’s source disputed much of what was attributed to him in the dossier. The source, who has not been identified, told FBI agents and DOJ officials that Steele embellished or misrepresented information in the dossier that suggested a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian government, according to the inspector general report.” (Read more: The Daily Caller, 2/17/2020) (Archive)