Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Lindsey Graham delivers his opening statement to the FISA report hearing with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

In an exclusive interview, Attorney General William Barr spoke to NBC News' Pete Williams about the findings on the Justice Department Inspector General's report on the Russia investigation and his criticisms of the FBI.

Nearly two years later, the inspector general's report vindicates the Nunes memo while showing that the Schiff memo was riddled with lies and false statements.

The Justice Department’s inspector general released the long-awaited internal review concerning the origins of the Russia investigation.

By John Solomon
JohnSolomonReports.com

To understand just how shoddy the FBI’s work was in securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant targeting the Trump campaign, you only need to read an obscure attachment to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report.

Appendix 1 identifies the total violations by the FBI of the so-called Woods Procedures, the process by which the bureau verifies information and assures the FISA court its evidence is true.

The Appendix identifies a total of 51 Woods procedure violations from the FISA application the FBI submitted to the court authorizing surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page starting in October 2016.

A whopping nine of those violations fell into the category called: “Supporting document shows that the factual assertion is
inaccurate.”

For those who don’t speak IG parlance, it means the FBI made nine false assertions to the FISA court. In short, what the bureau said was contradicted by the evidence in its official file.

To put that in perspective, former Trump aides Mike Flynn and George Papadopoulos were convicted of making single false statements to the bureau. One went to jail already, and the other awaits sentencing.

The FBI made nine false statements to the court.

And the appendix shows the FBI made another nine factual assertions that did not match the supporting evidence in the file. In another words, the bureau was misleading on nine other occasions.

The vast majority of remaining Woods violations — 33 in total — involved failing to provide any evidence in the Woods procedure backing up assertion in the FISA warrant application.

That’s serious too since the sole purpose of the Wood procedures is to ensure all evidence cited in a FISA application is documented as accurate and reliable so it can be trusted by the courts.

US Attorney John Durham, who is performing his own investigation into the origins of the Russia probe, has just released a statement indicating that, per his own investigation, he does not agree with some of the IG report conclusions:

“We do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to the predication and how the FBI case was opened.”

This is huge for him to put this out as the IG report comes out, in essence putting the brakes on the report and letting everyone know that there’s a lot more to this story.

Can’t wait to see what his report has to say when it comes out…

Investigative reporter John Solomon broke the news on Nov. 7 that there was yet another investigation being run out of the Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General’s Office, and the final report could even be publicly released ahead of the long-anticipated FISA abuse report. This new report will detail an investigation into violations of the FBI’s rules and regulations regarding the use of confidential informants. Now, what possible reason would the DOJ’s OIG have to suddenly want to take a good look this?

Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing discuss the highly anticipated FISA report.   ‘Worse than you can imagine for Obama Officials.. DOJ, FBI'.

The evidence suggests John Brennan’s CIA and the intelligence community
did much more than merely pass on details to the FBI.
It suggests they fabricated events completely.

By Margot Cleveland
TheFederalist.com
 

Last weekend, NBC News reported that the Justice Department’s probe into the origins of the Russia collusion investigation is now focusing on the CIA and the intelligence community. NBC News soft-peddled this significant development by giving former CIA Director John Brennan a platform (a pen?) to call the probe “bizarre,” and question “the legal basis for” the investigation. Politico soon joined the spin effort, branding the investigation Attorney General William Barr assigned to Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham “Trump’s vengeance.”

However, if the media reports are true, and Barr and Durham have turned their focus to Brennan and the intelligence community, it is not a matter of vengeance; it is a matter of connecting the dots in congressional testimony and reports, leaks, and media spin, and facts exposed during the three years of panting about supposed Russia collusion. And it all started with Brennan.

That’s not how the story went, of course. The company story ran that the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane surveillance of the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016, after learning that a young Trump advisor, George Papadopoulos, had bragged to an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. This tip from Downer, when coupled with WikiLeaks’s release of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails and evidence of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, supposedly triggered the FBI’s decision to target the Trump campaign.
 

The Real Story Is Different

But as the Special Counsel Robert Mueller report made clear, it wasn’t merely Papadopoulos’ bar-room boast at issue: It was “a series of contacts between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government,” that the DOJ and FBI, and later the Special Counsel’s office investigated.

And who put the FBI on to those supposedly suspicious contacts? Former CIA Director John Brennan.

“I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about,” Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee back in 2017. Whether or not there was collusion with Russia, Brennan didn’t profess to know, but he passed on the information to the FBI to reach a conclusion.