Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller, January 18, 2021: Pientka, in a Senate Judiciary interview, described seeking a validation review of Christopher Steele after the Page FISA, and said the enhanced review was “turned off” at the direction of Bill Priestap, then the FBI’s counterintelligence assistant director. The story says that dispute is why he asked off the team. That is labeled reporting from an interview, not a court finding that Priestap committed a crime.
Fox News (Singman, January 15, 2021) told the same story from the newly released transcripts: a request for an “enhanced validation review,” later “turned off,” leak concerns, a disagreement, a January 6, 2017 departure. Fox’s piece keeps the agent unnamed. Daily Caller and Conservative Treehouse put Pientka on the byline. CTH then adds a theory that he was “willfully blind” on FISA and later “promoted” to San Francisco. The theory is commentary. The San Francisco assignment is not treated here as a primary personnel order unless a government page is in hand.
No Daily Wire or Breitbart article that actually names Pientka on this episode was located in the required search. None was invented.