"Ballot harvesting is real, and it has become a big business. Our investigation into this ballot-harvesting ring demonstrates clearly how these unscrupulous operators exploit the elderly and immigrant communities - and have turned the sacred ballot box into a commodities-trading desk," O'Keefe said in a statement.
Trump appeared to agree with this assessment and fired off a tweet calling for an inquiry into the matter.
Omar responded to the tweet with a meme referencing allegations that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017. However, she did not address the allegations leveled by Project Veritas.
Ballot harvesting or ballot collecting is the practice of third parties collecting mail-in votes and delivering them to election officials. It is legal in many states to help physically impaired voters cast their ballots. However, it has sparked a series of legal challenges in Minnesota. Earlier this month, the state's Supreme Court ruled that "Minnesotans can still only help deliver and return up to three other voters' absentee ballots under special circumstances," local media reported.
Trump has been warning for weeks that states' plans to use mail-in ballots for November's presidential election could lead to voter fraud - an allegation the Democrats have dismissed.
William Barnett, an FBI special agent, was interviewed on Sept. 17 (2020) by Jeffrey Jensen, a U.S. attorney in Missouri who is leading a Justice Department review of the case against Flynn. Barnett, who worked out of the FBI's Washington field office, was the lead investigator on the Flynn component of Crossfire Hurricane. Barnett told Jensen and his team that he believed the collusion theory was "opaque," with little to no evidence of criminal activity.Others had similar intuitions, calling it a nightmare:
Barnett drafted a memo from the FBI's Washington Field Office on Jan. 4, 2017 that recommended closing the counterintelligence investigation. He believed Crossfire Razor was "problematic" and could result in an inspector general's investigation.
Barnett remained on the case, and would eventually join the special counsel's team, which was formed on May 17, 2017 in the wake of James Comey's firing as FBI director.
"There was a lack of letting the evidence lead the investigation and more the attitude of 'the evidence is there we just have to find it.'"
The messages were culled from the FBI's internal "Lync" messaging platform. The employees are not identified in the document dump, though they appear to have had detailed knowledge of the probe.Trump had something to say about the revelations: the FBI targeted him for a "coup".
One exchange suggests that an FBI official ordered the investigation of Flynn, whose code name was "Crossfire Razor," to be closed on Nov. 8, 2016. The time stamp for the message is 5:42 p.m., which would have been hours before Donald Trump pulled an upset victory over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.
One analyst wrote that investigators had "put out traces" and "tripwires to community" and found "nothing." "We didn't find anything else from the investigation about him," the analyst wrote, according to the court filing.
Flynn's lawyers said in the court filing that the messages show that investigators used National Security Letters as "a ruse" to extend the investigation. The documents are the fifth production of records provided to Flynn's legal team since Attorney General William Barr ordered a review of the investigation in January.
The Justice Department filed a motion to withdraw charges against Flynn on May 7, citing the discovery of FBI notes and memos that had not been given to Flynn's lawyers. Barr has said that he believes the FBI under James Comey set a "perjury trap" for Flynn.
The new documents were disclosed in a federal court filing on Thursday by Sidney Powell, defense attorney for former Trump adviser Michael Flynn. Seizing on the new release, the president ran a victory lap at a campaign rally in Florida, telling the crowd the FBI had been "caught" attempting a "coup." Trump remarked:
"Today a trove of text messages was released from FBI agents involved in the Russian witch hunt. You gotta see this. These people are scum. They were trying to do a coup. And we've caught them before that, we caught them spying on our nation... Never forget: they are coming after me because I'm fighting for you."
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