“My name is Joe Pientka and I’m a Supervisory Special Agent of a Foreign Counterintelligence Squad at the FBI’s Washington Field Office.” Joe Pientka III, Aug. 30, 2016 electronic communication, as hosted by Just the News
The memo exists. Just the News hosts a PDF of an Aug. 30, 2016 FBI electronic communication. The header names Joe Pientka III as the Washington Field Office contact and the drafter. Approvers listed on the face of that file include Peter Strzok and Kevin Clinesmith. The event date in the text is August 17, 2016. The location is the FBI New York Field Office, TS/SCI SCIF conference room, 25th floor, in support of ODNI candidate briefings.
The writer says he provided a counterintelligence and security briefing to Donald J. Trump, Chris Christie, and Michael Flynn. He quotes his own opening: a baseline on foreign-intelligence methodology, plus a warning that a classified briefing itself makes the recipients a target. The FBI portion, the memo says, lasted about thirteen minutes. That is the document. It is not a court finding of a crime.
John Solomon, writing at Just the News on July 23, 2020, quoted a question the memo attributes to Trump: “Joe, are the Russians bad? Because they have more numbers are they worse than the Chinese?” The Washington Examiner the same week printed the same exchange from the Ratcliffe-declassified file and noted the EC was filed under a Russia FARA / sensitive-investigative-matter heading. The question as written in the memo is a document. Solomon’s “spying” frame is commentary. So is The Federalist’s July 23, 2020 headline that the briefing was used “to spy on Donald Trump.”
Inspector General Michael Horowitz later told the Senate the FBI sent a Crossfire Hurricane supervisory agent to the briefing and that the agent wrote the session to the file. Horowitz called the use of the briefing a “pretext” for collection and wrote that it “could potentially interfere with the expectation of trust and good faith among participants.” The OIG text uses “SSA 1.” It does not print the name Pientka. Name linkage for SSA 1 is later reporting plus this EC and the civil docket.