FBI’S “PROHIBITED ACCESS” FILES: SMOKING GUN OR SMOKE AND MIRRORS?

TOP LINE

This week, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley launched an investigation into the FBI’s  “Prohibited Access” Files.  

Based on my investigative work, including Freedom of Information Act Requests, the Prohibited Access Files likely go beyond the FBI’s Trump Russia collusion probe and include other politically sensitive case files.

It is not a stretch to conclude  the FBI’s “Prohibited Access” designation stymied transparency and potentially denied evidence to defendants in criminal prosecutions. 

The larger question is who cooked up “Prohibitive Access,” who currently manages these sensitive files and who benefits most from the secrecy?

DEEP DIVE

The Prohibited Access Files were apparently discovered by accident.  

The FBI’s use of Prohibited Access Files was revealed after FBI Director Kash Patel declassified documents about researcher Nellie Ohr.  A Harvard and Stanford graduate, Ohr was deeply involved in the 2016 opposition research to paint then candidate, and later President Trump as a tool of Russia’s president.

(2019 Fox News report on Nellie Ohr and her husband Bruce Ohr, then a Justice Department official has stood the test of time.)

The declassifed 2019 FBI records contain evidence alleging that Ohr lied to congress about the depth of her involvement in the Steele Dossier.  This opposition research which contains salacious allegations against Trump was largely funded by the Clinton campaign.  

The dossier was wrongly used by the FBI to secure surveillance warrants in 2016 for Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The surveillance warrants opened the door for the FBI  to monitor the Trump campaign’s activities.

The FBI’s own memo states that “Prohibited Access” means routine searches in the FBI database turn up false-negatives.  In other words, the highly sensitive records exist, but a search of the FBI records system returns zero hits. It’s like the ultimate, bureaucratic black hole.   

As federal investigators considered whether Ohr should be charged with violating 18 USC 1001 which makes it a crime to lie to federal investigators, agents struggled to retrieve relevant information about Ohr because the files were coded “Prohibited Access.” 

“...relevant FBI/DOJ information related to this assessment was inaccessible to FBI investigators given that the Trump/Russia-collusion investigations were in FBI systems under "Prohibited Access" status which, unlike "Restricted Access" status, precludes investigators from detecting the existence of potentially relevant serials. In other words, when search terms that exist in the Prohibited Access-status cases are searched in Sentinel, the particular search will receive a false-negative Sentinel search response.”

This week’s revelation about Prohibited Access files prompted me to retrieve long standing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the FBI and Justice Department. 

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Some requests were made as early as 2014, about the time then-colleague Fox News correspondent James Rosen was at the center of a federal leak investigation and his records were seized.

My Freedom of Information Act request included “any and all records in the possession of the FBI related to, connected with or regarding Catherine Herridge, based on searches of the FBI’s Electronic Case File system, Central Records System and Electronic  Surveillance records, as well as any cross-referenced files concerning Catherine Herridge.”

At that time, I understood our reporting into the al Qaeda leader and American Cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was of high interest to the FBI. In some cases, we obtained Awlaki’s video messages to radicalize Americans before federal investigators were aware of them.

The New Mexico born cleric was an overlooked key player in the 9/11 terrorist attacks which killed nearly three-thousand Americans in 2001. Awlaki also had multiple, confirmed contacts with at least one FBI agent which were withheld from the first congressional investigation into 9/11 known as the Joint Congressional inquiry.  The question is why, and where were the records stored?

In response to my FOIA request…

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