Andrew C. McCarthy on the IG report
So now that I’ve struggled through the post I just wrote and published, I see we finally have Andrew C. McCarthy’s take on IG Horowitz’s report on the Clinton email investigation. And he—with his much greater knowledge of law, and his usual clarity—illuminates some issues that till now have remained murky.
Please. Read. It.
Christopher Wray told us the FBI is not biased and just to make sure they are unbiased they are all going to take objectivity training. If they are unbiased why do they need reeducation camps on objectivity?
McCarthy was worth waiting for. He nails it.
Unless there are serious consequences for those invovled in this clusterfuck, the Republic is dead and the rule of corruption, rules supreme. Last chance to end this conflict peacefully. Us oldsters need to not go quietly into the darkness of the totalitarians.
I don’t think Andy still believes that all of his upright, unpartisan friends are either.
Neo, you mentioned Alan Dershowitz in the Tweets post; any word from him yet on the IG report?
Also, porting over this comment from there, as it chimes with McCarthy’s appeal to common-sense:
Yancey Ward Says:
June 15th, 2018 at 1:37 pm
These people were willingly sharing their political opinions with each other. This is prima facie evidence that the investigative teams in both instances were deliberately selected because they had those political opinions. If there were an honest explanation for this, the biases on the two investigations would have been polar opposites- i.e. you have Clinton haters on the e-mail investigation and Trump haters on the Russian investigation, or vice versa. That it was Trump haters on both is the tell.
Found it.
Dersh is more sanguine than McCarthy, but he probably represents the most extreme (IE, sane) response from the Democrats that we will get.
“All in all, the IG report will help to restore the trust of the public in our nation’s Justice Department. If the recommendations in the report are followed, the future will be brighter than the past when it comes to the politicization of law enforcement. We still have a long way to go to restore trust, but this report is a good beginning.”
That’s his conclusion; let us say only that it is not universally shared. However, he starts with this, which I also saw elsewhere yesterday; it is a necessary caution, given what we know about changes in the drafts of Comey’s exoneration of Clinton:
“The report issued Thursday by highly respected Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation shows that FBI Director James Comey deserved to be fired for his actions. But an important question is unanswered: How has the report been changed from Horowitz’s findings as he originally presented them?
The report made public is apparently a revised version of an earlier draft written by Horowitz. It is imperative that Congress and the public get to see the first draft as well as the final product, in order to determine whether there have been significant changes — and if so, whether they were motivated by political considerations or basic fairness.
The rules of the Justice Department provide that anyone criticized in an IG report has the right to suggest factual corrections. That seems fair, and if that is all that was done, there should be no complaints. But if the published draft improperly whitewashed any individuals or scrubbed any valid criticisms, we have a right to know.”
Another unhappy camper.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/06/15/former-fbi-official-ig-report-is-wrong-fbi-officials-were-politically-biased-against-trump.html
“The report on the FBI’s Hillary Clinton email investigation issued Thursday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirms the gross misconduct of fired FBI Director James Comey, but — incredibly — fails to find any political bias in the actions of Comey and his inner circle.
Yet the political bias by Comey and his team was there and is obvious.
…
It was the hope of many of my current and former colleagues in the FBI that Inspector General Horowitz would be courageous enough to unmask Comey and his inner circle for what they were — rogue officials who played by their own rules, leaked with impunity and allowed their personal political biases to impact one of the most important investigations the FBI has ever conducted.
Comey, who is making big money with a self-flattering book and is now lecturing on leadership, led the Clinton probe by example by leaking, lying and flaunting clearly established and long-held rules and procedures.
Comey did major damage to the finest law enforcement and intelligence agency in the world — and it will take the FBI a long time to recover.
The first step towards recovery should be to purge the FBI of every remaining member of the Comey inner circle. With the firing of McCabe and Comey and the resignation of Lisa Page, action should be taken now to immediately fire Peter Strozk and the two attorneys referenced in the report who were so strident in their expressions of animus toward Donald Trump.
It is unfortunate that while Inspector General Horowitz conducted a thorough investigation, his courage failed him when he needed it the most.
There is no question that the FBI investigation of the Clinton email practices was tainted by strong political bias against Trump, and a strong desire to minimize harm to Clinton, so that she could be elected president. The IG report should have reached this conclusion.”
Chris E. Swecker served 24 years in FBI as Special Agent. He retired from the Bureau as Assistant Director with responsibility over all FBI Criminal Investigations. He currently practices law in Charlotte, N.C.
It wasn’t Horowitz’s job to reach a conclusion in the absence of documentary evidence that the bias did drive the investigation. That is up to Jeff Sessions and Congress. There is far more than enough evidence in this report to support a true criminal investigation by a US Attorney of obstruction of justice by the people in the Obama DoJ and possibly the White House itself. Horowitz doesn’t have subpoena power- he can only request cooperation, and I note that many of the most important witnesses left rather than cooperate in any way. A true criminal investigation would fix that. The ball is Session’s court, and it is time for him to act.
No one with 2 brain cells to rub together ever needed a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Most of us try to take the facts as we know them and reason forwards to a conclusion. Lawyers appear to be adept at starting with a desired conclusion and then working backwards. Whatever. There’s a reason people don’t trust lawyers.
The part of the report that I find fascinating is that reporters who acted as conduits for FBI leaks were actually bribing members of the FBI to keep the leaks coming. See
http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/14/inspector-general-put-together-insane-fbi-leak-chart-upon-finding-rules-widely-ignored/#disqus_thread
for a couple of charts. Shouldn’t both the agents and reporters be prosecuted for this? I’d like to see a list of reporters and agents published so that they can all be publicly shamed. Even more important, did they hand out tickets to Stormy Daniels performances?
The Rule of Law is officially dead. We now know we live in the Age of Rule of Man. We already had a feeling but the IG report spells it out for us, in detail.
There are two classes in our country. One can act with impunity, including the commission of felonies. They will face nothing but a slap on the wrist., if that; they might even be promoted/rewarded. The other class will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and beyond, draining them of resources and livelihood, wrecking them if they can’t be imprisoned outright.
Which class do we Deplorables belong to?
Plan accordingly and keep your powder dry.
Tom Rogan in the Washington Examiner wrote on why the agents didn’t examine the “… the Blackberries or other email devices belonging to her inner circle at the State Department.”
Their excuse was, in Rogan’s words, “… the agents thought that they might find so much classified information on unauthorized servers and systems that they would become lost in the maze… it may also have produced physical evidence to indicate prima facie criminal mishandling of classified material.”
This is a Sergeant Schultz defense from the old “Hogan’s Heroes” show. He would get a glimpse at something and would ask what it was. When Hogan would begin to explain, Shultz would stop him and say, “Nevermind. I don’t want to know.”
If you don’t look at it you won’t find it.
The IG exempted himself from reaching the obvious conclusion. The political bias is expressly evident. The report is just more evidence of dialed in deep staters protecting their own.
Andrew McCarthy is so brilliant here. Wow.
miklos:
McCarthy is brilliant. He was one of the first post-9/11 writers I used as a reliable legal guide. I believe the first time I read his work was this article from April of 2004, and I was extremely impressed by his ability to clearly explain things that were difficult to understand, as well as the scope of his knowledge.
These days I’m also astounded at how quickly he turns out these long, lucid, informative pieces.
Goodness knows what we can’t see. I have speculated that Sessions may be playing possum, but given his continued wet noodle behaviour I can’t help but think the deep staters have something on him so horrible that he can’t resign and must continue to act as the stopper in the bottle of an utterly corrupt Justice Department. Unlike any other person likely to be elected President Trump isn’t beholden to the money that elected him because he used plenty of his own and is a free agent – not a paid actor, or department store dummy. That is what our politicians have mostly become. I’d like to think there are still a few Mr. Smiths in congress but am hard pressed to think of any except Devin Nunes – but I’m hopelessly biased because I grew up on a dairy farm and believe that dairy farmers just don’t use bribery as their primary way of doing business. Ever try to bribe a cow? Or take them out on the links for a round of golf? 😉
PowerLine prints a Branco cartoon that sums it up.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/06/cartoon-of-the-day-2.php
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/06/15/the-really-big-central-question-the-doj-ig-remarkably-failed-to-ask-of-an-anti-trump-fbi-attorney/
“The exchanges continue into page 418, and that’s where we see two arresting messages from FBI Attorney 2.
(the insert won’t copy but is summarized below)
Attorney 2 is worried that his name is prominent in the Bureau’s documents about the investigation of the Trump campaign staff.”
And yet, the IG never again mentions that peculiar motive for acting on bias, or quizzes Attorney 2 about it.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/06/15/the-doj-ig-report-makes-it-pretty-clear-what-the-fbis-priorities-were-in-2016/
“Tonight I will focus on just one point.
The point crystallizes in a passage that starts on page 328 of the report. Immediately preceding this passage, the IG discusses reasons offered by FBI headquarters personnel for the delay in processing the Anthony Weiner laptop for evidence related to the Clinton emails “matter.”
FBI officials had been aware of the laptop’s potential significance since around 28 September 2016, at the latest, but it took until the end of October for the Bureau to decide to reopen the Clinton matter because of the laptop. Announcing that they were reopening the case, only days before the November election, couldn’t help looking political, and having potential political consequences.
One of the chief reasons offered by FBI officials for this timeline was that the Russia-Trump investigation took priority. If you’re looking for reasons to excuse the FBI for its behavior, that might sound superficially plausible.
But the IG report doesn’t just leave it there. In the passage starting on page 328, it goes on to make — in mild, precise language — a very telling point. The FBI is a big organization, and there were plenty of options for processing both cases with adequate attention and manpower for each one. Yet the FBI didn’t do that.
…
But the real story here, in my view, is the bigger picture point that both of the cases — Clinton’s emails and the Russia investigation — were being very tightly controlled by the same small group of individuals.
That’s a big tell. It’s a tell that the priority driving everything was political. Tight control of information and investigative discretion, by the same individuals, means politics. It’s how you arrange things when you don’t want neutral, good-government priorities to accidentally kick in.
It almost certainly would have been no strain on capabilities or resources to run the Hillary investigation in New York, or to run the Russia investigation from the Washington Field Office (which has a long history of handling such cases). From some routinely-considered standpoints, it would have been better. The FBI and DOJ headquarters offices would have had more objectivity in a supervisory role (and certainly more credibility as witnesses afterward, if they weren’t policing themselves in the observance of their rules for things like receiving foreign human intelligence, and processing FISA requests).
But that’s not how the cases were handled. They weren’t handled as if the priority was to reach good-faith conclusions and end up with actionable evidence, if such evidence existed. They were handled as if the tools of law enforcement could, and probably would, have political impact – and as if that, itself, was the point.
Doing that was a choice, and the case assignment and staffing merely demonstrate that it was a choice made in advance. Forget Strzok and Page. In terms of the FBI’s major muscle movements – its most basic procedural decisions – the question of whether it was acting from political motives in 2016 is settled at this point.”
https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/15/tying-hillarys-emails-to-the-russian-collusion-probe/
“There are many facts and details regarding both investigations that still need to come to light. In the meantime, it is becoming increasingly difficult not to conclude that the Russia probe was, at least in part, an operation designed to control the inevitable damage that would have afflicted the Clinton campaign had her emails surfaced. Of particular concern, it seems, was the email showing that she and Obama had communicated over an unsecured server while she was on Russian territory.
The identity of the foreign adversary that serves as the entire premise of the Trump investigation was suppressed in the Clinton probe. It seems important to know why.”
https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/15/those-feds-forgot-the-al-kamen-rule-or-they-didnt-care/
“D.C. bureaucrats used to have “The Al Kamen Rule” for email. He was a WaPo columnist who ran leaks, rumors, and scuttlebutt. The rule was, never send an email if you didn’t want to see it in Al Kamen’s column the next day.
Now, consider the five agents who sent hundreds of highly political texts, including openly discussing affecting the 2016 election. FBI agents. On FBI devices. Many, many times. And these are just five agents the OIG investigated. This tells me that a) They didn’t care who saw their messages, or thought it didn’t matter. And thus b) there was an open, explicit culture at the FBI to bash Trump, bash his supporters, and consider his election all but illegitimate. Deeply, deeply, deeply troubling.”
Not to lose sight of what all this IG report really revolves around, which is the totally disparate treatment of Clinton and Trump by the Obama agencies:
https://www.weeklystandard.com/eric-felten/what-we-can-learn-from-carter-page-and-russias-bumbling-spies
“In late January 2015, Attorney General Eric Holder and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara announced charges against three Russians living in New York and believed to be spies: Evgeny Buryakov, Igor Sporyshev, and Victor Podobnyy. Each had a thin cover job: Buryakov was ostensibly an employee at the Manhattan branch of a Russian bank, Vnesheconombank; Sporyshev was a trade representative for the Russian Federation; Podobnyy was an attaché to the Russian mission at the United Nations. In reality the men were all agents of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR.
How did American authorities know the men were spies–well, other than the fact that Sporyshev and Podobnyy, with their phony-baloney diplomatic jobs, all but had the word “spy” tattooed on their foreheads? There was incontrovertible evidence: They were on tape talking extensively about their spy business.
…
The savvy reader will by now know where this is going. The analyst with the energy company was actually an undercover FBI employee. Together with the “purported industry analysis” documents, the binders contained hidden recording devices. Sporyshev “took the binders to, among other places, the Residentura.” The G-men listened in from March 2012 through September 2014. What a beautiful piece of tradecraft, getting Russian agents to bug their own cone of silence!
…
Which brings us to the implications that have been missed all along.
The first is that, for all we’ve been hearing about Russia’s attempted interference in the 2016 election, everything we know about Russia’s hobbled espionage capabilities in the United States–and we know quite a lot, given the FBI’s listening device that operated for years in the heart of the New York Residentura–suggests that Vladimir Putin’s regime would have a hard time influencing a dog-catcher’s election in Poughkeepsie.
The second is a sort of dog-that-didn’t-bark affair. Remember the dossier, written by ex-British-spy Christopher Steele and paid for by the Clinton campaign, the document that did so much to launch the narrative that Trump colluded with Russia? The Steele dossier alleged that Trump had conspired with Putin for five to eight years, and that the operation was handled by “Russian diplomatic staff in key cities such as New York, Washington DC and Miami.” But during the time of this supposed conspiracy, the FBI was listening in to the conversations of the very Russian spies posing as diplomatic staff in New York. If there had been a Trump-Kremlin connection being operated out of New York, wouldn’t one expect the topic to have come up in the discussions among Russian intelligence officers in the supposedly secure safe-room at the Residentura? Would the spy trio have been so bored and disheartened if they had been running a secret asset who just happened to be one of the richest celebrities in town?
That said, there are limits to what is publicly known. The complete transcripts collected by the FBI were never released–just enough, and then some, to establish that Buryakov, Sporyshev, and Podobnyy were spies. But we do know that the FBI acted on the names that turned up in the spies’ conversation. When Podobnyy told Sporyshev in 2013 how he planned to feed Carter Page “empty promises,” the FBI promptly went and had a conversation with Page to warn him he was being targeted. Is it credible that Donald Trump’s name would have turned up and been ignored by the FBI? Is it possible that Bharara would have come across references to Trump in the course of a high-profile prosecution and not done anything with the information?
Then again, maybe Buryakov, Sporyshev, and Podobnyy talked at length about working Trump after all. Perhaps the FBI has just forgotten they have some such unreleased recordings buried in the file. Or maybe the bureau has already identified the relevant tapes and turned the transcripts over to the special counsel’s team. But if Mueller did have such tapes, would he have sat on them for so long?
If there is any mention of Trump in the Residentura bootlegs, let’s hope the FBI digs them out and the special counsel brings them forward, sooner rather than later, so that the whole collusion question can be answered.
Absent those possibilities, what are we to take away from the lack of any reference to Trump in the unguarded conversations of top Russian spies in New York? Is it unreasonable to take it as an indication the tale of a Trump/Russia conspiracy is not to be believed?”
“Half-baked” was much too kind.
“Shoddy” seems more correct.