The IG's half-baked report on FBI abuses

Andrew McCarthy:
...

For all his assiduous attention to detail, IG Horowitz has weaved a no-common-sense report.

On August 8, 2016, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, borderline hysterical, texts her lover, agent Peter Strzok, about GOP candidate Donald Trump: “He’s not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”

Strzok replies, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

Now mind you, Page isn’t just any old lawyer; she is counsel to the FBI’s deputy director (Andrew McCabe) and involved in virtually every significant decision the bureau makes. And Strzok is not any old agent; he is deputy assistant director and one of the FBI’s top counterespionage agents — and he steered both relevant investigations, Clinton-emails and Trump-Russia.

This August 8 text exchange does not occur in a vacuum. It is part of ceaseless stream of anti-Trump bile. It is, moreover, just a week before the infamous text in which we learn that top-level bureau officials met in the deputy director’s office to discuss what they saw as the harrowing possibility of a Trump presidency; Strzok urged that, though highly unlikely, this prospect was so intolerable that the bureau needed an “insurance policy” against it — i.e., the Russia investigation.

The August 8 text also occurs against a backdrop in which the FBI has rushed to close the Clinton-emails investigation on an arbitrary deadline for patently political reasons — no other criminal investigation is guided by the electoral calendar. And it occurs at the moment the FBI is moving aggressively to turn its counterintelligence powers against the Trump campaign: An informant has already been deployed, intelligence agents are mobilizing, foreign intelligence contacts have been tapped, and the bureau will soon submit to the FISA court an application to surveil Trump adviser Carter Page — an application that breaks every rule in the book: anonymous foreign sources spouting multiple hearsay, no corroboration, no disclosure to the court that it comes from the opposition presidential campaign, no explanation that the foreigner who supplied the unverified allegations has been booted from the investigation for lying, etc.

Yet you’re not supposed to string any of that together. On August 8, Strzok vows that the FBI will “stop” Trump, but if you’re asked to evaluate the agents’ motivation for actions that helped Clinton on a different day, you’re supposed to pretend that August 8 never happened — that the striving for a case against Trump at the same time the case against Hillary was being buried never happened.
...
There is much more.

Horowitz's report bogs down in the details and misses the plot.  McCarthy makes a persuasive case that the rush to exonerate Hillary Clinton and the quick turn to the Russian collusion hoax were integrally related.  They both had a common theme.  Help Hillary survive her misconduct and keep Trump from becoming President.  It is really not that hard to stitch this dual conspiracy together.

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