INTERVIEW – JOE DIGENOVA – legal analyst and former US Attorney to the District of Columbia

• Mueller’s office disputes BuzzFeed story about Trump directing Cohen’s false testimony. WASHINGTON – In a rare public statement, special counsel Robert Mueller’s office on Friday disputed a blockbuster report from BuzzFeed News that alleged President Donald Trump directed his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie in his testimony before Congress. Despite worldwide coverage and intense interest, Mueller’s office has stayed mostly quiet on reports regarding the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. But on Friday, Mueller’s office took the rare step of calling BuzzFeed’s story “not accurate.”
• FISA shocker: DOJ official warned Steele dossier was connected to Clinton, might be biased. (By John Solomon, opinion contributor — 01/16/19 07:20 PM EST) — When the annals of mistakes and abuses in the FBI’s Russia investigation are finally written, Bruce Ohr almost certainly will be the No. 1 witness, according to my sources. The then-senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official briefed both senior FBI and DOJ officials in summer 2016 about Christopher Steele’s Russia dossier, explicitly cautioning that the British intelligence operative’s work was opposition research connected to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and might be biased. Ohr’s briefings, in July and August 2016, included the deputy director of the FBI, a top lawyer for then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and a Justice official who later would become the top deputy to special counsel Robert Mueller. At the time, Ohr was the associate deputy attorney general. Yet his warnings about political bias were pointedly omitted weeks later from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant that the FBI obtained from a federal court, granting it permission to spy on whether the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to hijack the 2016 presidential election. Ohr’s activities, chronicled in handwritten notes and congressional testimony I gleaned from sources, provide the most damning evidence to date that FBI and DOJ officials may have misled federal judges in October 2016 in their zeal to obtain the warrant targeting Trump adviser Carter Page just weeks before Election Day.