SENIOR FBI OFFICIAL LIED ABOUT ACCEPTING SPORTS TICKETS FROM REPORTERS

A senior FBI official accepted tickets to sporting events from reporters and initially lied about it to government investigators, according to a report released Tuesday.

The conduct of the FBI official, who has not been identified, violated federal regulations that prohibit federal employees from accepting gifts from journalists and other “prohibited sources.”

The improper gifts were discovered in text messages reviewed by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) as part of its investigation into the FBI’s handling of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails and the Trump-Russia investigations.

The same investigation led to the firings of Andrew McCabe as FBI deputy director and Peter Strzok as deputy chief of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. McCabe was found to have falsely denied authorizing leaks to the media in October 2016 about the Clinton probe. Strzok, who led the Trump-Russia probe, was found to have exchanged anti-Trump text messages with his mistress, FBI attorney Lisa Page.

Both Page and former FBI general counsel James Baker resigned from the bureau on May 4.

The official, who retired from the FBI during the investigation, will not be referred for prosecution, the OIG said.

Read the entire article