Lawfare Daily: Excavating Arctic Frost

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And other representatives in the hopes of creating this brown swell of criticism that allows them to overwhelm the actual narrative. It's the Lafaire podcast I'm Benjamin Wittis, editor-in-chief of Lafaire with Lafaire Senior Editor, Mike Feinberg. At the time, they were seized, they did not belong to Donald Trump, they did not belong to Mike Pence, under government executive branch rules, as government issued phones, the two individuals had no reasonable expectation of privacy in what they used the phones for.

We're going back to Arctic Frost today. There's been a giant trove of documents released over the last several years by Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in an effort to discredit the Arctic Frost investigation of Donald Trump. Mike Feinberg read it all, and you'll be surprised to know he found that it didn't quite say what Chuck Grassley thinks it says. So Mike, you have written parts one and part two of the paranoid style in American oversight.

How many parts are there going to be? Just three. The investigation of Arctic Frost, which the pieces are about, is everybody knows, was curtailed with the election of Donald Trump to the president. Per OLC policy, Jack Smith had to dismiss the case and discontinue the prosecution. So there's only so much to do with what's in the public record.

“It didn't get nearly as far, I think, as the prosecutors hoped, even if it did get farther than I think Donald Trump and his defense team would have liked.”

So the only really remaining question for me to look at is, what is this oversight trying to do?

Because as the first two pieces argue, the oversight largely by Senator Chuck Grassley to a lesser extent by Congressman Jim Jordan is not really revealing anything on toward or inappropriate.

They're selectively releasing documents in an a chronological order, which tends to jinn up controversy because they're choosing things that in a vacuum to people who don't understand law enforcement or prosecutions might seem overly aggressive. But when you actually look at what they've released in the context of the investigation and compare it to extent DOJ and FBI policy, there were zero missteps in terms of the agencies overstepping norms or bounds or laws or policies. And I think the investigating agents actually behaved with an admirable amount of restraint.

All right, so we've just skipped ahead of a huge amount of stuff by having me start kind of in media risks, but let's tack back and talk about what this series was about.

“How did you come to be writing a three part pay-in to Richard Hofstetter and Chuck Grassley?”

Well, starting toward the end of the Biden administration, a number of purported whistleblowers, although I don't think that terms actually apply here, began funneling documents to Chuck Grassley.

There was no context provided whatsoever. Names were not redacted. It's not normally how these things are done.

Later on, Cash Petell would release documents directly to Jim Jordan, and it's really not done to not redact those. And it seems to me that Trump's allies in Congress with the assistant of the FBI's highest executives were not trying to actually conduct oversight, because the things they were complaining about are bringing to light were not actually any form of wrongdoing.

“Or waste fraud or abuse or violation of any sort of policy, what they appear to have been doing.”

Among other things is just undermining the whole investigative process in public for the purposes of supporting Donald Trump's contention that the election was stolen.

All right, so let's talk about the two parts that you've written, and then I will have you preview a little bit what's going to be going on in the third part.

Part one is really about it's kind of an introduction to the project, but it is also a kind of announces the idea that Chuck Grassley has told a story with the release of these materials.

But that they don't support the story that he's told. So I want you to, at the highest level of altitude, give me an account of what the story Chuck Grassley thinks he's telling looks like.

“If you're a manga follower of this information ecosystem, what have you learned that a whole bunch of declassified and released FBI documents through the good offices of Chuck Grassley? What is the story you think you've been told?”

So the story Chuck Grassley is trying to tell is essentially that a rogue FBI senior leader in Assistant Special Agent and Charge at the Washington Field Office forced through the opening of an unjustifiable investigation into Donald Trump's efforts to contest the 2020 election. And in doing this, he violated a host of FBI policies. He sought out individuals who were like-minded to him, had them staffed the case. And the agents who staffed the case then ran haphazard over civil liberties and wasted taxpayer money doing something that they had no predication or justification for doing.

And does he name that person? He does. He does. So I don't want to pick on somebody who's in fact innocent of these horrible deep state conspiracy charges.

“But I want to make clear that the person he's going after here, part of the argument is that there is no merit to any of this, but who are we talking about here?”

We're talking about an individual named Tim Tebo, who actually after the attention brought to him by Grassley, which in my view was largely unmarried with one exception which we can get into, he ended up resigning, but Grassley has still continued to criticize him to this very day. If you go to his website and do a search for his name, I think you come up with something like 42 separate press releases or speeches criticizing this individual and claiming that he was really at the forefront of a conspiracy to halt Donald Trump's political fortunes.

And just to be clear, we're not here talking about the 2016 conspiracy. In the language of the grand conspiracy, we're talking about a second phase of it, right, where Jack Smith and some rogue FBI agents extend the 2016 conspiracy to prevent Trump from coming back.

The investigation that I'm writing about, the sole investigation I am writing about, is an investigation that the FBI codenamed Arctic Frost, and it was an investigation into what is widely known as the fall selector plot, which is where according to the allegations in an indictment put forward ultimately by Jack Smith, even though at the beginning this was just a regular FBI and DOJ investigation.

“Donald Trump basically conspired with a number of other individuals to get a number of swing states surrogates to put forward an alternate slate of electors when it came time to certify the 2020 election.”

And they used, if you read Jack Smith's report and you read the indictments, they functionally use these individuals to cast doubt on the real results in the hopes of first stalling the certification of the election.

Chuck Grassley has actually been relatively good about keeping his aperture relatively narrow on this specific series of events.

“Once Jim Jordan starts chiming in, things go a little bit, and I say this as somebody who had a home in the Republican party much longer than is an independent, things go off the rail.”

Jordan at one of the hearings where he is essentially grilling Jack Smith can struck this wide ranging conspiracy going back really to 2015 when there are allegations about connectivity between the Trump campaign in Russia. He loops in the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane efforts, the Mueller special counsel, the Jack Smith investigations both into the misunderstanding of classified documents and attempt to overturn the election. He brings in Hollywood actors and the West Coast cultural establishment. I refer to it in my second piece as a paranoid Fantasia, and I really encourage everybody to click on the link provided there and actually read what he has to say, because it's the sort of thing that would come out of a 70s paranoid thriller something like the parallax viewer,

where winter kills, it is a series of connections that bear zero scrutiny.

So it's fair to say, then, I mean, most people who listen to this will really never have heard of this conspiracy theory, but it's a piece of the kind of grand conspiracy.

And it's the reason fair to say it's sort of the reason that Jim Jordan held these hearings with respect to Jack Smith. And the principal public effect of it so far other than the destruction of a rears of individuals like Temtebo and the attempt with respect to Jack Smith has been to cause the release of a very large body of documents, right, which is actually a real thing that's happened.

“And it's all sitting on Chuck Grassley's website, a large body of material that now Cash Patel has been cooperating with and just providing to the judiciary committee, is that a fair summary?”

What would add in one word to your description of the documents? And that word is selective. They have not taken a case file and dumped it on mass for the public to review.

There are arguments against releasing investigative findings, findings without a conviction that applied to every case and would apply here. But in terms of transparency, had they just released the entire Arctic frost case file, we would not be sitting here. Because what they have done instead is picked out, not just what will seem the most controversial to the public, but they've picked out things that they know are going to upset other senators and other representatives in the hopes of creating this groundswell of criticism that allows them to overwhelm the actual narrative.

In indictment, I would add that went through many of the judicial safeguards in terms of DOJ approvals and ratification by the citizenry that I think lends it a certain amount of legitimacy.

“You know, in any one of these developing and conspiracy theory out of real material, you have inevitably a set of distortions, and so I want to take through what the major historical distortions is.”

The oddity of this is that grassly provides you the information that you need in order to rebut the very things that he's saying is that.

Not entirely, but mostly you're citing material, these articles are made up of materials that in fact he released.

“No, I am taking the materials he released, then going back to DOJ and FBI policy manuals and guidelines that are available publicly other places and sort of doing a comparison of what he says happened that was wrong to what the actual policy is.”

Give us an example of that. What is, you know, if you read the the Chuck Grassley over a what's the biggest building block of the conspiracy that he reveals in these documents that you look at and say, that's perfectly consistent with DOJ policy. There's a lot we can go through and I'm happy to go through it all. It might be more beneficial to just walk through the investigation is Chuck Grassley has laid it out and sort of rebut things one by one.

“Let's do it. Okay. So the investigation begins per Grassley's documents with a series of discussions between DOJ officials FBI officials, some lower ranking FBI agents on how to respond to a referral from the National Archivist of the United States.”

That there appear to have been massive irregularities with the number of electoral certificates submitted in a number of swing states. Well, this is not actually news to anybody. The media had reported on the false elector plot extensively before this investigation was open. It was one of the main bones of contention between different factions in Congress on January 6. FBI doesn't just open an investigation based on an AP news report. You need a little bit more than that. So the referral from the National Archivist sort of gives them that hook.

And they start to examine how and if this investigation should be run. And they debate a lot of things. They talk about who should be the subjects. They talk about should it be centralized to the individual cases.

And Grassley really hangs his hat on a few points. The first is he publishes different drafts of the opening E.C. and E.C. being short for electronic communication.

And it's the standard document when opening an FBI investigation. I wrote God knows how many of them one I was an agent. And Grassley has a number of the different drafts that have gone back and forth before they were finalized. And in some of these drafts, Donald Trump is named as a subject. In some of the drafts, there are just what we refer to as unsubs on known subjects. And it ping pongs back and forth in the various drafts. And he takes this to mean that originally Donald Trump was not a subject, the investigation. And then somehow his timtebo is involved in the emails back and forth about how to run this thing Donald Trump becomes a subject.

Now, that is something that happened, but there's a whole bunch of intermediate steps that Grassley ignores.

They're learning more, they're getting more information, and something else is going on. Donald Trump, as people know, is a significant political figure, who is widely assumed to be running for real action in 2024.

That implicates a process at DOJ that requires certain officials to sign off on the investigation before Donald Trump can be named as a subject.

So it's only natural that Donald Trump is not an initial subject, but then if you go and actually look at a lot of the documents that are publicly available at a certain point DOJ signs off on it. Chris Ray in the FBI signs off on it, Lisa Monica and Merrick Garland sign off on it, and then immediately thereafter Donald Trump becomes a subject in the investigation. Which is exactly the way the process normally works, right? Correct. So yes, if you did not know this was the process and that you needed those approvals before you could name Donald Trump as a subject, it would look to you like he was shoehorned in there at the last minute.

But what was actually happening is that the FBI was just following the processes for getting the necessary approvals before naming him for a subject.

“And once that document is signed, I think within a day or two he's added as a subject. There's nothing nefarious about it. They just couldn't take that step until they had gotten the relevant approvals.”

They weren't being sneaky. They were assiduously following policy.

So what's another example of this where there's sort of a major component of the conspiracy theory that you look through the documents and you hold them up against policy. And I assume the main policy document you're looking at here is the so-called dyog. Correct. Which stands for the domestic intelligence and operations guidelines. It's sort of to the extent that FBI has scripture governing what people can and cannot do that is it. It is ridiculously voluminous.

Right. It's thousands of pages.

“Yeah. So let me let me take one thing that Chuck Rassley continually brings up.”

And he claims that there is something called a no self approval rule in the dot dog. And he is right. What that rule states is that if you are the author, the stated author of a document in an FBI file, you cannot be the final approver of it. Now in order to get entered into an FBI file, depending on the type of documents, somebody needs to write it and sign it and then any number of officials need to,

I mean, we also just call it signing. Let's say they certify it.

“Right. So you're run of the mill stuff. This summary of an interview that is of somebody who's not a sensitive figure.”

Your supervisor just signs off on it. So the case agent does the interview writes up the summary, gives it to his or her supervisor the supervisor signs off on it and it goes into the file. The more sensitive and high profile you're getting, the more people who need to certify it. And one of the individuals who certifies on the opening E.C. is Tim Tibo. Tim Tibo also in earlier emails, massages the language of the E.C.

So Chuck Grassley takes this to mean. Tibo violated the no self approvals rule. He had a part in writing the documents. Therefore, he should not have been allowed to approve it. There are a number of words I could use to describe this contention. I'll go with Baldur Dash, given that this is a family show.

If somebody who is involved in the writing of a document cannot be a signatory on it, then I'd say 50% of the FBI's files are invalid. The rule is to prevent the final signatory from being somebody who is involved in the publication of the document. So I can break that apart for me because you're getting into an area of FBI bureaucraties that I'm not sure a lot of listeners will understand.

So the problem is let's say I'm an FBI agent and I write up an interview.

That interview needs to be vetted as a sort of measure of quality control and institutional integrity by somebody other than me. That person is usually my supervisor.

“But if the supervisor wasn't there, how would they know?”

What do you mean?

I mean, if they read your 302 and you went and interviewed Ben Whittison, they weren't there for the interview.

How would they be in a position to evaluate the quality of the write-up? What they're evaluating, like look, a certain amount is taken on faith. And that is almost everything that FBI does has testamentary value.

“The check on the truthfulness of the matters asserted in the document is cross-examination and jury presentations and trials.”

What the supervisor is looking for is that you in the drafting of that document and in the things you're relating and admitting to having done have not violated any FBI policy. It's less of a substantive check on the content than it is a check on the document itself, compording with policy. Let's sort of break down the opening EC that we're talking about here in order to better illustrate this. So, a number of agents are writing an EC to open an investigation on the fall-selector plot. Because the fall-selector plot involves somebody who is widely assumed to be running for reelection in a few years, it needs to be approved by a lot of people.

The language needs to be tightened. What I mean by the language needs to be tightened is if you show this document to a jury or an inspector general or congress. It needs to be clear that the facts you are asserting in there need a certain legal standard that allow you to open the investigation. You cannot have a situation where the agents write up the opening and sign it themselves because then there's no check. There is nobody looking at whether they met the legal standard they need to open the investigation.

In the case of arctic frost, what you have is the supervisor, the assistant special agent charge was Tim Tibo, and the investigating agents engaging in a dialogue about how do we articulate this to make sure that we're meeting the standard. If they sign off on the document and because of those conversations, if they were the only ones who signed off on the document, we'd have reason to be a little bit suspicious. But because this is such a high priority sensitive investigation, there's about a half does another people who sign off after Tim Tibo.

So to claim that because Tim Tibo is a signatory, it violates the FBI's policy on a document being uploaded when the author is also the signatory ignores the fact that there were many people above Tibo who also had to review it and authorize it before it was approved. And then with that, the FBI is just simple. If you're on the Apple Pay button tips, you can use a card without a special text directly. You want something else? Just simply type in your search for an account.

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All that awaited you in the new Staffel.

Also, streamed yet the newest Staffel House of the Dragon and Alessirian from Game of Thrones, Nur, on HBO Max. So let's talk a little bit about how you've broken this subject up. This is an enormous subject. It's a fairly large body of material. What did you do in part one following this introductory section where you kind of bring up the large subject,

“talk about what the series is going to do? What bounds part one of the series?”

Part one is about how the investigation gets opened.

So I do my best to robot the allegation we've just been discussing, but there's also a whole bunch of other accusations, lobbed a teamo in the Washington Field Office that don't make sense to me as somebody who is in the organization. And frankly, as an American citizen, who now wants the organization held to the highest standard. You know, one of the things that teabull really gets raked through the calls by Grassley is that he had picked the agents who would be the investigators. Where Grassley sees a bug, I see a feature.

Because if you actually look at the backgrounds of the investigators and there's enough in the public view to do this, you see that they were uniquely suited to handle an investigation of this magnitude. Both of them were public corruption agents, which is where this investigation would naturally fall. One of them was the only public corruption agent in Washington Field Office who had also been an assistant US attorney in her prior life. The notion that that would be a bad thing, having a lawyer who's actually prosecuted cases on a sensitive investigation where everything needs to be done by the book is incredibly strange to me.

The other individual who was picked to be one of the case agents was the primary investigator of the Maria Boutina scandal, which was largely a national security counterintelligence investigation, but it's one that dealt with the plethora of elected officials.

“So for those who don't remember, we have a number of episodes of this show about Maria Boutina, who is a Russian gun rights activist who came to the United States as a graduate student and ended up leading guilty to”

a number of crimes or related to operating as a Russian agent in the United States in interaction with a number of prominent people. That of fair description of her? Yeah, it's a totally fair description. So the two agents, the table picks, one has extensive experience having to interact with senior elected officials because of her work on that case. And the other is a former federal prosecutor who is going to know the law inside and out better than almost anybody else in that office, I imagine.

And to be clear, supervisors and ASACs pick what agents are going to work, what cases every single day. The majority of investigations that an agent works on are not ones here she chooses, there are ones here she is assigned.

“The SSA or in really important cases the ASAC and like I've served in both of those roles, I know what I'm talking about here.”

In veryably tries to pick the people who are best suited to carry out the investigation.

It has nothing to do with political views, which we never actually know about each other.

It has nothing to do with trying to secure a guilty conviction. It has everything to do with whose experiences are going to help us get at the truth it issue in this specific case. And I can't fault Tibo with the people he chose for this one based on their backgrounds. So let's talk about part two, which came out last week and covers a different subject. Yeah, so part two is where I sort of dispense with the opening injuries that get us to the point where the investigation is open running.

And as somebody who is an investigator, as somebody with a law degree, as somebody who is not shy about criticizing his own former organization, when necessary, like I don't think they did anything out of the ordinary, I don't think they did anything out of policy.

“In fact, I think what they did was actually quite cautious.”

And we're talking about two investigative techniques, mainly, which are rarely a cause for controversy. The first is interviews. And the second is obtaining toll records. Now, there's different ways, as I talk about in the piece, to examine how inclusive an investigative technique is on the right to the accused.

And FBI agents are mandated, it's like the closest thing that the dialogue has to a foundational law to always use the least intrusive method.

And the dive is clear, like it doesn't provide a ranking of what methods are the most intrusive and which are the least. But it does you number things like almost in a talmudic way, which I realize is probably not a metric, which has been used for the dialogue before. But there's clues within the text that tell us what is intrusive and what is not.

“The first is how many levels of approval does it take to use the technique?”

You know, in interview, generally requires no, usually a require supervisor approval, looking at open source research or other government agency documents, usually requires no approval. Doing an NSL, doing a wiretemp, that requires usually, you know, SAC approval, who is the highest individual in the field office.

And NSL, for those who don't know, is a national security letter, it's basically a letter that demands production of communications metadata from a service provider.

So I think, you know, we can intuit that the techniques which require fewer approvals are going to be less intrusive than the techniques which require many.

“Similarly, that the I have three different types of investigations and levels of increasing severity. You have assessments, preliminary investigations and full investigations. You are not allowed to do the same things and all of those.”

You have a relatively few number of tools in an assessment, and you have everything under the sun in a full investigation and something in between in a preliminary investigation. So, if a technique is allowed under an assessment, it's generally going to be less intrusive than the technique for which you need a full investigation.

Now, the interviews that Grassley is upset about are aside from going online and reading a newspaper, one of the least intrusive things that FBI agents do. First of all, they're voluntary.

You are under no requirement absent to subpoena to respond to an FBI request to sit for an interview. And when we look at the planning documents for the first round of interviews that Grassley provides, we see agents actually being a hypercocious in terms of who they're going to approach, how they're going to approach them and when they're going to approach them. They sort of filter the list for people who might be political candidates and they just take them out of the pool entirely. We're not going to go interview these people.

You look at people who have counsel. If they have counsel, we're going to work through their lawyers as is legally required. We're not going to try and find a way to do an end-run around that. And in many cases, the people who are represented in maybe other investigation in other jurisdictions also don't get interviewed. Then there's the people who they attempt to interview who say they want counsel. Okay, hands off, get counsel, get back to us if you like, and we'll talk later. Then there are individuals who initially agree to do an interview.

And then on site, get violent or have second thoughts. Those interviews are curtailed immediately. And even after, in one case, threats of physical violence, the FBI agents don't respond in the way they would respond.

But the notion that these inner views are overly aggressive just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The second thing about the inner views that grassly, really hammers hell upon is the amount they cost.

“And this is really ludicrous. I forget the actual number, but I did the math comparing to what the cost of doing all these interviews was because agents had to travel to other jurisdictions to do them.”

And it's something like 0.0000001% of the FBI's budget. I've spent more myself on a single operation that lasted two hours than these agents spent on dozens of interviews.

So there's no there there in terms of the criticism. And then we get to the second investigative technique that really does cause a political firestorm.

And it's one in my judgment that is entirely undeserved. And that was the request for toll records of a number of senators and one member of the House of Representatives.

“It's important to remember what toll records are. toll records are metadata. They are a record of what phone number called what phone number on what date and for how long.”

And it's important that when you get toll records, you don't even get the identities of the individuals to whom those numbers belong to if you don't already know them.

So if I'm investigating Benjamin witness, and I request toll records, either through an NSL or through other legal processes that do not involve classified materials, I know your number. So when I get the returns back, I'm going to know that 5551212 belongs to you. But you don't know that every single number on my toll list is a famed mobster, you just see numbers. The processes and come up with predication that would again have to go through numerous approvals just to figure out who those numbers belong to. And this caused a firestorm.

There is an attempt to get financial remuneration for the senators that failed miserably Natalie or pet and I wrote article on that feature alone. But there's something that really gets lost in the discussion here. And that is a grand jury did find a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the United States presidential election. The senators and representatives who had their toll records seized by the investigators to a person either gave incredible rhetorical support to that conspiracy and or refused to certify the results of the election on the basis of what the conspirators were saying.

So it is a little difficult for me as somebody who used to be a criminal investigator to understand why that would not be fair game. I do want to talk about one more investigative technique because grassly makes a lot out of the fact that two phones were seized from the White House, one of which used to belong to Donald Trump and one of which used to belong to Mike Pence and a phone was seized from representatives Scott Perry. And in those cases depending on what was still on the phone and what had been deleted previously, there may have been content in the form of text messages, voice males, potentially call records and the recent calls and potentially some emails depending on what types of phones they were.

“I suspect to the phones that were being used by Donald Trump and Mike Pence, grassly alleged a very important fact.”

Those phones did not belong to Donald Trump and Mike Pence any more than the computer I used at the FBI belonged to me. They were property of the executive branch as a corporate entity which outlasts any single administration.

The two individuals had no reasonable expectation of privacy in what they used the phones for.

So there is zero problem with the White House giving those phones to the investigators. And with respect to Scott Perry's phone, that was done pursuant to a search warrant which went through all the legal protections and multi branch processes that it would need to go through to abide by our traditions of civil liberties. So I really don't see any controversy in the seizure of those devices. All right, so before we turn to the biggest picture in the most macro sense, give us a little preview of what you're planning to do in part three.

So I titled the piece "The Paranoid Style in American Oversight" because I was trying to use Richard Hofstetter's original essay about paranoia and conspiracy mongering in far right politics as a means of almost jokingly saying that like, all Grassley's doing is feeding a conspiracy here.

“But I was a little bit disingenuous, because I think there actually is a conspiracy going on here.”

It's just the one Grassley is taking part in, not the one he is claiming to expose.

And I think it's really too full that I don't want to get too into it because I think, I will in the piece, but I think there are two things happening here, and I don't think they are accidental at all. I think there is a concerted effort to lay the groundwork for popular support among the Magapopulation to fire very specific FBI personnel.

“There is an actual trend where something gets leaked to Chuck Grassley with an individual's name in it.”

Chuck Grassley makes a request to the FBI for more information about it. Cash, Patel, or his surrogates give unredacted information back to Grassley or Jordan.

And when I say, I want to focus on the unredacted part for a second, because the FBI is a matter of policy has never before revealed the names of investigators below the SES level.

This is totally out of the norm. Somebody leaked something to Grassley, Grassley makes a formal request based on the leak. Cash, Patel, turns over the documents and does not black out the line level agents names. Certain segments of the media start writing stories about these people demanding that they be fired. And then a couple of weeks later, they are in fact fired without any sort of new process.

“So what I think we're actually seeing here on the one hand is a priming of the pump to just ruin the lives of anybody who investigated Donald Trump.”

There's something else that is even more nefarious from a societal viewpoint that I think is happening here, which is they are actually trying to undermine faith in a completely legitimate investigation for the purpose of rewriting history. If they can claim that this was an illegitimate investigation, all of a sudden, a lot of Donald Trump's grievances go from being off the wall unhinged and unfounded to legitimate. And in doing so, they are also helping the narrative that Donald Trump has some sort of prophetic insight into what elections are fraudulent, which ones are not.

And I do not think that this is entirely disentangable from the allegations we see going on in California and what I fear we are going to see after the midter's. All right, let's zoom out, you've been a line agent, you've been a supervisor agent, you've been a special assistant special agent in charge, you've been a special agent in charge on an acting basis, you've seen a lot of investigations, including a lot of complex investigations.

And do you think there is any point, even a small one on which Grassley has a point that, you know, certain steps should have been avoided or, you know, let me answer the last part of that question first. Tim Tibo made a number of, well, he reposted a number of things on LinkedIn that were critical of Donald Trump. The Office of Special Council get reprimanded for it, but I do think you can impute bad intentions or any violations of policy from that simply because they're not appear to be any FBI agents.

“Always have their own opinions, it is not a good idea to post them publicly, I think, but there is nothing in the case file in the document.”

Do you ever post any of your, you know, private opinions about horror movies while you were in government?

I never had any form of social media until maybe my last four months in the FBI, I joined. I joined LinkedIn, but I was never on anything else. Why was in the FBI?

Until you never included, like in social media, sort of your known controversial views about animatronics and then wow. Okay, just checking because I wouldn't want you to be hypocritical about it and turn out to have a history of expressing, you know, controversial opinions about the French new wave or something. No, no, look, Tibo aired by doing that, but there is nothing in the documents provided by grassly that indicates his personal beliefs played the slightest part in the opening of this investigation.

And I'm going to now answer the first part of your question, which is part of the reason I'm not particularly worrying about that is because this wasn't a particularly aggressive investigation.

They did not do anything horribly out of the ordinary, they didn't do anything out of the ordinary. Every technique that grassly has talked about so far is a very run of the mill technique.

“Did they move a little quicker than some other investigations?”

Yeah, of course, but that's something that happens in every special counsel investigation with maybe the exception of Ken Star. You're on a limited time, a limited budget. There are a lot of forces battering you to wrap it up sooner than later, so they moved a little faster, but even moving with that sort of a lacquerity did not translate to any violations of policy or overly aggressive actions. So, what are the practical effects of this? You know, it's been going on for a while now, it produces every now and then an eruption of noise, particularly when they drag Jack Smith and front of committees.

But mostly it produces document releases that make certain waves in a certain corner of a right wing ecosystem and nobody else even notices except you.

“What does this matter outside of the 30 people who are obsessed with it?”

It matters quite a bit, and in ways that the public may not be fully cognizant of, the first is it obviously matters immensely to the agents who've been fired.

But nothing wrong, they did not choose to work on this case, and they have had their names dragged through the mud and the reputations destroyed and their livelihoods have viscerated. In one particularly tragic case, cash-patel personally fired somebody within days of his wife passing away. And it's worth noting that some of the other lawsuits against FBI firings are by two division heads who refused to carry cash-patels orders out to go after these individuals. So when the two assistant directors I'm talking about were told you will fire agent to accident agent why they said no cash-patel, not only fired agent accident agent why, but also fired the assistant directors who refused to carry out his dirty work.

There are always going to be sensitive cases in the FBI, and there are always going to be times where people in power abuse that power, and engage in criminal schemes for their own enrichment or for their own aggrandizement. And the FBI is really the only game in town for investigating those offenses. But if you are an agent and you see what is happening to the Arctic frost investigators now, you are going to do everything you can to avoid being assigned to a sensitive or high profile investigation.

And even if you get assigned, there is going to be a powerful incentive for you to avoid doing your job. And that's upsetting for those of us who love the institution, but it's more upsetting for any citizen who thinks that politicians should be held to the same standards and expected to follow the same criminal laws as the rest of the country. Mike, we're going to leave it there. Thank you for joining us today. The series is the paranoid style in American oversight. Part one was back in February. Part two was last week and part three will be sometime in the indeterminate future. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Jen Potia and our theme music is from Alibi Music as always. Thanks for listening.

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