Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley are on a fishing expedition to unearth the origination of conflicts within the IG report on FISA abuse. However, a word of caution, they could be on a snipe hunt and here’s why.
First, their letter. Grassley has a history within this story. Grassley has been lied to by the FBI about their use of dossier author Christopher Steele. Two years ago Grassley/Graham called out the FBI lies by sending the DOJ a criminal referral for Chris Steele.  Not surprisingly the referral went no-where and was summarily ignored by the DOJ.
Now, Grassley/Johnson want four IG footnotes declassified by Bill Barr.

(pdf link)

Grassley and Johnson are noting contradictions within the IG report.  If they are looking to reconcile contradictions, save yourself some research and read an article by Margot Cleveland SEE HERE which seems to be the north-star Chuck and Ron are following.
People are starting to question the assembly of the IG report because the underlying explanations by the FBI officials within it are fraught with a lack of candor.
Many of the officials who gave explanations to the inspector generals’ office are the same FBI officials who participated in the scheme to target Donald Trump, president-elect Trump, and President Trump.   As a consequence the FBI contradictions stem from sketchy FBI surveillance explanations that do not match the documented FBI activity.
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Did the original scope memo from Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 authorize Team Mueller to investigate allegations in the Steele Dossier?…  Allegations that were already debunked by the FBI four months earlier in mid-January 2017?

There’s more than a little irony in this brief CNN soundbite where Evan Perez is discussing the FBI’s fraudulent FISA applications.  On January 10th, 2017, it was the same Evan Perez along with CNN’s Jim Sciutto, who were operating as conduits from the FBI ‘small group’ to push the Steele Dossier as a valid investigative document. {Go Deep}
Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper and Carl Bernstein were working together with the FBI group headed by James Comey, to push the legitimacy of the Steele Dossier.
While the CNN crew was coordinating with the FBI; literally two days before the FBI renewed the FISA warrant on January 12th; and shortly after CNN pushed the narrative; FBI agents visited the U.K, interviewed Steele’s primary sub-source and determined the dossier was garbage.   It was the Steele Dossier being identified as garbage that made the FISA renewals invalid…. the same Dossier that Evan Perez was promoting in 2017:

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Inspector General Michael Horowitz informs us in his report the FBI determined the dossier was bunk “shortly after” the January 12, 2017, FISA renewal.
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An interesting ruling, brief and order from the FISA Court (Judge Boasberg) released today [pdf here] reflects an admission by the DOJ the 2nd and 3rd FISA renewal against U.S. person Carter Page were invalid.

The “DOJ assesses that with respect to the applications in [April and June 2017] “if not earlier, there was insufficient predication to establish probable cause to believe that [Carter]Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power.””

The original FISA application was October 21st, 2016.  The first FISA renewal was January 12, 2017 (84 days from origination).  The second renewal was April 7, 2017 (85 days from prior renewal).  The third renewal was on June 29th, 2017 (83 days from prior renewal).
The DOJ has now attested to the FISC the FISA application on April 7, 2017, and the FISA application of June 29th were invalid.  However, the DOJ has not taken a position on the validity of the original application, Oct 21, 2016, or the first renewal of January 12, 2017.
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Ohio congressman Jim Jordan appears with Maria Bartiromo to discuss the full background of the FBI surveillance impetus and how the bigger picture brings all of the government activity forward to the actions behind an impeachment trial.
In the full picture, the totality of government effort, the arc of all swamp action, has been to remove a president who is everything these administrative state officials oppose.  It is the independence of a Peoples’ President that represents the threat to the system…

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It has always been a curious question about who released the controversial text messages between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and FBI Supervisory Agent Peter Strzok.  In a DOJ court brief (full pdf below) in support of a motion to dismiss the lawsuit of Peter Strzok, former Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein explains how and why he authorized the release:
It would have been a little more interesting if Rosenstein could have narrowed down the timing of OIG notification from “in the summer of 2017”, as it would outline specifically when Rosenstein became aware of the controversial issue.  Before or after he joined the crew in authorizing -and signing- a false FISA application?….
Obviously, at least in my opinion, the lack of specificity here is evidence of Rosenstein’s CYA motive.  If Rosenstein was aware of the texts from inside the key participants of the Crossfire Hurricane team, prior to authorizing the third FISA renewal… he was either a complete doofus, or complicit and willfully blind.   I digress.
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Another New York Times report of James Comey under investigation for unscrupulous, potentially illegal, leaks surrounding the FBI Clinton investigation. However, a note of caution: is this simply chaff and countermeasures intended to keep the heat off corruption monitors Bill Barr and John Durham?

In 2018 congressman Jim Jordan noted James Comey had a special employee on assignment ‘off-the-books’.  People started asking questions and Fox News Catherine Herridge detailed how Daniel Richman held special access privileges to the FBI, as an outcome of former FBI Director James Comey authorizing his friend as a “Special Government Employee” or SGE.
According to The Times the current issues surround media leaks from James Comey to his “special FBI employee” friend Daniel Richman related to the Clinton investigation:

(VIA NYT) […] The latest investigation involves material that Dutch intelligence operatives siphoned off Russian computers and provided to the United States government. The information included a Russian analysis of what appeared to be an email exchange during the 2016 presidential campaign between Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida who was also the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee at the time, and Leonard Benardo, an official with the Open Society Foundations, a democracy-promoting organization whose founder, George Soros, has long been a target of the far right.

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There was a major discrepancy in the Inspector General report on FISA abuse, that appears to have been overlooked and casts a considerable cloud upon the DOJ Office of Inspector General and Michael Horowitz.
In chapter ten of the report, on page #312 you will find the following information.  The claim is that no-one in the FBI initiated any use of “Confidential Human Sources” into the campaign prior to opening the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.  Read Carefully:

(Page #312 – pdf link)

“In our review, we did not find any evidence that the FBI used CHSs or UCEs to interact with members of the Trump campaign prior to the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”…

However, in the very next chapter (#11, page #400), in the original IG report as released on December 9th, 2019, you will find the following statement:
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Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon joins Sunday Morning Futures to discuss rising support for democracy around the world and connects the movement to the impeachment effort against President Trump.  Big Stuff. Big Ugly type stuff.
A fired-up Bannon looks at the Senate impeachment trial as the “trial of the century”, where the professional political class gets brought into the trial and the framework becomes an expose’ on how President Trump is willing to take down the system.

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With increased scrutiny toward the actions, and lack thereof, from current FBI Director Christopher Wray, another sketchy aspect deserves some scrutiny.
Hat Tip Techno-Fog for noting some remarkable FBI activity.

Supervisory Special Agent Joseph Pientka III was first identified by Senator Chuck Grassley in May of 2018 as the second FBI agent involved in the 2017 interview of Lt. General Michael Flynn.
Frustrated by the FBI stonewalling his Senate inquiry, Chairman Grassley dropped the revelation publicly on May 11th, 2018, in a letter to the FBI.

[…] the Committee’s oversight interest in the underlying documents requested more than a year ago now outweighs any legitimate executive branch interest in withholding it. So too does the Committee’s interest in learning the FBI agents’ actual assessments of their interview of Lt. Gen. Flynn, particularly given the apparent contradiction between what then Directory Comey told us in March 2017 and what he now claims.
[…] In addition, please make Special Agent Joe Pientka available for a transcribed interview with Committee staff no later than one week following the production of the requested documents… (link)

The FBI never produced Supervisory Special Agent (SSA-1) Joe Pientka for Chairman Grassley’s committee, and the conflict between the Senate Judiciary Committee and the FBI was never reconciled.  (The DOJ/FBI made it to the safety of the mid-term election.)
Additionally, every single document containing information about the investigative activity of FBI agent Pientka has kept his name redacted.  Not a single DOJ/FBI document has ever included his name.
However, around two months after Grassley outed his identity; we discover from the Inspector General that the DOJ-NSD (National Security Division) admitted to the FISA court that Agent Pientka was significantly less than forthcoming with “factual omissions” in the Title-1 surveillance application he assembled against Carter Page.
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President Trump asks: “Are these “dirty cops” going to pay a big price for the fraud they committed?” 

However, the only person who can honestly answer that question is the person in the mirror when President Trump brushes his teeth.   Perhaps forgotten…
In the spring of 2018 a group of congressional reps led by Devin Nunes, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert, Lee Zeldin and Bob Goodlatte, asked President Trump to declassify a series of documents so the public could see how former officials in the DOJ & FBI abused their offices and conducted political surveillance.
In September of 2018, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein asked President Trump not to declassify those same documents until after the Mueller probe was complete.  Rosenstein informed the President (confirmed in later POTUS interviews) that declassifying the material could be interpreted as impeding the Mueller investigation.
Two months later, in November 2018, the mid-term election took place.  Republicans lost the House and their committee chairs.  Many people suspected (I concur) the mid-term election was the real motive for the Sept. 2018 request from Rosenstein.  Four months after the mid-term, March 2019, the Mueller investigation of President Trump ended.
Two months after the Mueller probe ended U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, a profoundly supportive voice for DAG Rosenstein, asked President Trump to grant him unilateral declassification authority to assist the purposes and intents of his DOJ effort.  President Trump granted U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr with the authority to declassify on May 23rd, 2019; granting access to the same documents requested by congress a year earlier.
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