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Inspector General Horowitz’s FBI FISA Abuse Report
Read the FISA Abuse report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz yourself here rather than relying on talking heads to tell you what’s in it. And remember, none of the pundits or so-called experts on TV currently confidently telling you what’s in the report have had time to read its 476 pages yet.
Update: U.S. Attorney John Durham rebased the following statement:
I have the utmost respect for the mission of the Office of Inspector General and the comprehensive work that went into the report prepared by Mr. Horowitz and his staff. However, our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department. Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.
Another Update:
Here is Attorney General Bill Barr’s statement:
Nothing is more important than the credibility and integrity of the FBI and the Department of Justice. That is why we must hold our investigators and prosecutors to the highest ethical and professional standards. The Inspector General’s investigation has provided critical transparency and accountability, and his work is a credit to the Department of Justice. I would like to thank the Inspector General and his team.
The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken. It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory. Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump’s administration. In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source. The Inspector General found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory. While most of the misconduct identified by the Inspector General was committed in 2016 and 2017 by a small group of now-former FBI officials, the malfeasance and misfeasance detailed in the Inspector General’s report reflects a clear abuse of the FISA process.
FISA is an essential tool for the protection of the safety of the American people. The Department of Justice and the FBI are committed to taking whatever steps are necessary to rectify the abuses that occurred and to ensure the integrity of the FISA process going forward.
No one is more dismayed about the handling of these FISA applications than Director Wray. I have full confidence in Director Wray and his team at the FBI, as well as the thousands of dedicated line agents who work tirelessly to protect our country. I thank the Director for the comprehensive set of proposed reforms he is announcing today, and I look forward to working with him to implement these and any other appropriate measures.
With respect to DOJ personnel discussed in the report, the Department will follow all appropriate processes and procedures, including as to any potential disciplinary action.
Via Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, you can sign up at HearTheIGReport.com to hear Adam Baldwin read the entire report verbatim.
Read: DOJ inspector general… by Fox News on Scribd:
Published in Politics
They recommend “performance reviews?”
No criminal prosecutions? Not even firing people?
These “poor performers” aren’t McDonalds workers. They know what they’re doing.
Unbelievable.
Barr:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/statement-attorney-general-william-p-barr-inspector-generals-report-review-four-fisa
Thanks, I added this to this post.
To be honest, I wasn’t expecting anything big in terms of consequences. The IG’s job is to protect the Department of “Just Us.” They have different laws than the rest of us. So in Horowitz’s report on the Hillary email investigation he found that there was political bias for Hillary and against Trump but that he just couldn’t figure out whether or not that affected the outcome of the investigation or not.
A friend who makes the repeated mistake of watching Hannity is stunned by the IG Report. I am not really surprised. Horowitz was limited to the documents within the FBI and the testimony of people who were never going to rat each other out about true intentions, meaning and uses of those documents. A presumption of good faith and innocence was not really going to be disturbed except for the idiotic sustained surveillance of America’s most demonstrably innocent man, Carter Page. Horowitz could largely clear his own agency by saying they were entitled to rely on what the CIA provided, including the head of the CIA’s implicit endorsement of the Steele dossier which reliance shaped the misstatements in the FISA misuse. FBI gets a pass and Horowitz can still eat lunch in this town. Shocker.
The MSM will crow but the impact is really limited: Breaking: The IG has nothing new to say about something the public is really sick of hearing about…
If Barr/Durham have a witness or a document that puts this crapfest in its true light and if someone actually gets indicted, Horowitz fades. If Brennan et al successfully covered the slime trail such that Barr and Durham come up empty, then it’s all over anyway.
One reason we know there was bad faith by the FBI, etc. is that they have not gone after Steele or his sources.
If honest FBI agents acting in good faith were burned by Steele or his sources, the agents would have sought prosecution of Steele or the sources.
I am actually reading the Executive Summary and here is what I have gleaned so far.
Here is a great money maker about the FISA warrant.
The Steele Dossier:
The reason they cant recommend criminal charges.
A more thorough investigation from a organization with say Subpoena powers like the US Attorney could find more pressing evidence in ways unavailable to a IG.
I also find it shocking to learn that much of the FISA warrant information used against Page, was taken from when he was working for another ‘Government Agency’ providing them with useful intelligence on the Russian he was meeting with. A fact not disclosed to the Administration who approved the warrant. That is bloody disgusting.
Stay tuned!
So apparently under the current rules it doesn’t take much to launch an investigation it seems.
Filed under HOLY CRAP!
In conclusion
It seems that the current rules of the FBI let all sorts of craziness be pursued without any potential oversite and that you can deliberately omit material to your bosses. They cant press charges cause they didn’t break any of the rules, but the rules are so awful it allowed them to do awful things. Though the ‘performance reviews recommended’ is very bureaucratic language for ‘you need to fire all these people.’
And as Barr put out in his statement a lot of them have already been.
Frightening indeed.
They could have done a lot more than recommend performance reviews. How about recommending dismissal?
So the independent investigator finds no cause for prosecution, or firing, and the political appointees of the president disagree. Big surprise. I’m sure the presidents men will lie however they need to to support him as they have done through out the last three years. And the Trumpist Ricocheti will go along with their lies.
Probably because they didnt find enough evidence to support that conclusion.
Reading the summary I could hear the IG visibly eye rolling through out much of it.
Basically the entire time I kept thinking he probably would say this in private. “look what do you want from me. I can only look at the work emails. They were not dumb enough to leave anything incriminating on those.”
An example of what I mean is below.
As someone who has actually read the executive summary, I suggest maybe you take sometime before rushing to judgement.
I apologize for my earlier reaction and ad hominem attack. Its not befitting Ricochet.
Copy and Paste from another thread
Please be nicer.
I think it all stems from a couple of self-image problems
The left doesn’t not believe they are ideological. This was a constant annoyance for people like Jonah Goldberg during the Obama administration.
AND
Politicization is what “noticing left wing ideological politicalization” gets called, which is a consequence of the first point.
All of these problems with liberal self-image go back at least as far as the Bush administration. I think the extent to which we were willing to make excuses and lie to ourselves about Bush, dislocated the left from the political axis and its been a slow moving avalanche ever since.
We are social animals after all and we can’t understand ourselves except in relation to others.
I am under no illusions that Trump is anything other than a moderate center left democrat, running as the socially liberal fiscal moderate Democrats have been telling Republicans to run for decades.
I have edited it after my cool off. Thanks for calling me out on it.
Thank you so much. If you could only see some of the things I have said at Ricochet!
The Executive Summary is 15 pages long! Can we please have an Executive Summary of the Executive Summary?
Yes. It says that some people in the justice department behaved badly and should have this reflected in their performance reviews.
Oh, that’s better than what I thought. I thought it said some pigs are more equal than others.
So no real wrongdoing? Just a bunch of incompetents at the highest level?
Then Trump should announce that he will open a counterintel investigation of Biden and associates. Just to watch the poopfit that the media and Dems will throw. He can follow the same playbook since the IG has declared that all the plays were legal.
This is why Trump will be defeated, because he sees the country’s Attorney General as “his” lawyer.
Brilliant!
You’re grasping at ever shorter straws.
I haven’t waded thought the IG report yet. Were the bogus FISA applications and other malfeasance done by a few rogue agents in the Cincinnati office or was it all in response to an offensive YouTube video? In any event, the important thing is that the Obama Administration remains scandal-free and Orange Man bad.
I would love to see polling numbers on how many voters will base their vote on whether they think the AG ought not to be the president’s wing-man.
The RINOs and commies who strain at the gnat of the Ukraine phone call while swallowing the camel of the abuses done to foment an utterly baseless Russian collusion narrative are ridiculous people.
Not sure what you mean by this or why your friend would be surprised. I regularly watch Hannity. I’m not at all surprised by today’s events.
False. And you know it.
More generally, this is what all IGs do everywhere. They exist to protect their institution by providing nominal review of employees’ actions against published rules. Actually concluding that the organization was deeply corrupted would threaten serious external “interference” in the institution, so no such conclusion will ever be reached by an IG. “Mistakes were made” and “processes should be reviewed/revised” are nice safe conclusions that allow the organization to respond to external authorities (Congress, the president, the courts) with “oh, yes, we are working diligently to do better, we have X working groups working X recommendations.”
You know what. I give up.