For all of you that wanted the IG to dress up and play Rambo with the players I'm just going to come right out and say it - you're idiots.

The IG just is a fact finder based the info he can find. It's a broad power and scope but he has no power to arrest anyone, change policy, prosecute people or anything else except conclude things and make recommendations.

Change comes from other people.

IG did his job and without him, you simply wouldn't know shit about how bad it is at the FBI.

Your focus should be on people who can make changes or institute them. That's where you should be and not ranting and raving about the IG.

You are absolutely correct the IG just reports. He has no power to bring charges. Thats why I am waiting to see what Huber does. I don't suspect it will be much.

quote:

Originally posted by mbinky:
You are absolutely correct the IG just reports. He has no power to bring charges. Thats why I am waiting to see what Huber does. I don't suspect it will be much.

It will largely depend on the evaluation of the evidence, what is admissible, what might not be, and what might be foreseen as injecting reasonable doubt.

There is no point getting all fired up and putting on a trial if you have reason to conclude that some evidence supports a likely conclusion of reasonable doubt that will result in Not Guilty verdicts.

The evidence will be sifted through the very fine tooth comb of experience, in great detail.

But who knows?

National Review
Andrew McCarthy


You’ve got to hand it to Michael Horowitz: The Justice Department inspector general’s much-anticipated report on the Clinton-emails investigation may be half-baked, but if it is, it is the most comprehensive, meticulously detailed, carefully documented, thoughtfully reasoned epic in the history of half-bakery.

Why say do I say the report “may be half-baked”? Why don’t I just come out and declare, “The report is half-baked”? Well, I figure if I write this column in the IG’s elusive style, we’ll have the Rosetta Stone we need to decipher the report.

See, you probably sense that I believe the report is half-baked. But if I say it “may be” half-baked . . . well, technically that means it may not be, too. I mean, who really knows, right?

If that annoys you, try wading through 568 pages of this stuff, particularly on the central issue of the investigators’ anti-Trump bias. The report acknowledges that contempt for Trump was pervasive among several of the top FBI and DOJ officials making decisions about the investigation. So this deep-seated bias must have affected the decision-making, right? Well, the report concludes, who really knows?

Not in so many words, of course. The trick here is the premise the IG establishes from the start: It’s not my job to draw firm conclusions about why things happened the way they did. In fact, it’s not even my job to determine whether investigative decisions were right or wrong. The cop-out is that we are dealing here with “discretionary” calls; therefore, the IG rationalizes, the investigators must be given very broad latitude. Consequently, the IG says his job is not to determine whether any particular decision was correct; just whether, on some otherworldly scale of reasonableness, the decision was defensible. And he makes that determination that by looking at every decision in isolation.

But is that the way we evaluate decisions in the real world?

In every criminal trial, the defense lawyer tries to sow reasonable doubt by depicting every allegation, every factual transaction, as if it stood alone. In a drug case, if the defendant was photographed delivering a brown paper bag on Wednesday, the lawyer argues, “Well, we don’t have X-ray vision, how do we really know there was heroin in the bag?” The jurors are urged that when they consider what happened Wednesday, there is only Wednesday; they must put out of their minds that text from Tuesday, when the defendant told his girlfriend, “I always deliver the ‘product’ in paper bags.”

Fortunately, the judge ends up explaining to the jury that, down here on Planet Earth, common sense applies. In our everyday lives, we don’t look at related events in isolation; we view them in conjunction because they read on each other. Let’s say on Monday I confide to my friend that I can’t stand Bob, and on Tuesday I tell Bob I can’t join him for dinner because I have other plans. It may or may not be true that I have other plans, but common sense tells you my disdain for Bob has factored into the decision — even if I don’t announce that fact to Bob.

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.

Utterly biased people may have made manifestly flawed decisions, but as long as they were not blatantly irrational decisions, we’re going to call them justifiable and move on.
How does the IG pull this off? Two ways.

The first, as mentioned above, is methodology. By disavowing any intention to pass judgment on the rightness of any particular investigative decision, by announcing upfront that he is confining himself to an assessment of whether the decisions were rational, Horowitz reads motivation out of the equation. If there were two investigative options — e.g., (1) give immunity to Paul Combetta (the service technician for Clinton’s server who lied to the FBI and destroyed evidence) or (2) prosecute him for false statements — the IG says his analysis is limited to whether the option chosen was objectively defensible.

This turns out to be an abstract analysis with a lot of gobbledygook about whether the prosecution would have served federal interests, whether Combetta was undermined by bad lawyering, etc. The IG is going to tell you that while immunity might not have been the best choice, it was a defensible choice — it enabled the FBI to get his testimony faster (i.e., to lie to them in a more timely fashion on the artificially compressed deadline they’d established for closing the case without charges). What is Horowitz not going to consider? That a hundred times out of a hundred, in cases not involving Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy, most normally aggressive federal prosecutors, including Trump-Russia prosecutor Robert Mueller, would have charged Combetta and squeezed him to roll over on his confederates.

Instead, Horowitz says it was a rational decision, so we’re done with that one. Whoa, whoa, wait a second. Was it an appropriate decision? Was it made because they were in a rush to close the case so that Clinton (their preferred candidate) could run against Trump (whom they were determined to “stop”) without the cloud of an investigation hanging over her?

The IG won’t answer that question — not without a canyon’s worth of wiggle room. Utterly biased people may have made manifestly flawed decisions, he tells us, but as long as they were not blatantly irrational decisions, we’re going to call them justifiable and move on. But were the decisions politicized? If a biased person makes a less than optimal decision, isn’t there an itty-bitty possibility that the bias clouded his judgment?

In essence, the IG answers, “Who really knows?” . . . except he says it in a way that enables the FBI to pretend he has found no evidence of bias at all. Observe this gem, from the report’s executive summary:

We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions.

Directly affected? What does that mean? Do the FBI and Obama Justice Department have to stamp the “I’m with Her” logo on Combetta’s immunity agreement before we can say bias directly affected the decision? Could bias have indirectly affected the decision?

Who really knows, right?

The IG’s second tack involves the facts he chooses to present. The report is truly half-baked because it omits half the story — all Clinton emails, no Trump-Russia. Of course, that’s neither how the cases evolved, nor how the investigators looked at them.

When Ted Cruz dropped out of the GOP presidential race, making Trump the de facto nominee, the very first thing Strzok said upon hearing the news from Page was, “Now the pressure really starts to finish MYE” — i.e., “Mid Year Exam,” the code name for the Clinton caper. The best way to “stop” Trump was to free Hillary to beat him. So, the bureau simultaneously labored to close the case on her and invent a case on him.

In the blink of an eye, then-director Comey was briefing Obama’s National Security Council on Carter Page; the Obama intelligence agencies were tapping their foreign partners, targeting Trump-campaign advisers to run informants at, and internalizing the Steele dossier. While the FBI scooped up the last laptops it needed to complete the predetermined closing of the emails probe, Attorney General Lynch had her convenient tarmac chat with Bill Clinton, and conducted the perfunctory interview with Hillary — an interview so pointless that the FBI and Justice Department did not object to the presence of Mrs. Clinton’s co-conspirators in the room, even though the IG report concedes that this flouted elementary investigative protocols.

Meanwhile, here is Strzok, having finished the Clinton interview and closed out the emails case, preparing to wing his way to London to conduct some real interviews — interviews with witnesses who might help him “stop” Trump:

And damn this feels momentous. Because this matters. The other one did, too, but that was to ensure that we didn’t F something up. This matters because this MATTERS.

Get it? This, the Trump case, “MATTERS” in comparison to the Clinton case. The only thing that mattered in the Clinton case was that the FBI avoid doing anything too grossly indefensible in implementing the months-long strategy to close the case without charges after appearing to do an energetic investigation. But the Trump case matters because it “MATTERS” — because in the Trump case, Strzok and Page and the others actually get to do what the FBI usually does: make a case on a bad guy we have to “stop” — informants, wiretaps, subpoenas, predawn search warrants with guns drawn, charging people who lie to us, threatening decades of imprisonment against witnesses we’re trying to flip.

The candidate they were almost certain would win got the case dropped.
How do you best evaluate the FBI’s approach to the Clinton case? Well, if I may invoke that term again, common sense says you look at how the same agents handled another case which bore on the same event that informed their every decision, the 2016 election. The question is not whether every Clinton-case decision was defensible considered in isolation; it is whether the quality of justice afforded to two sides of the same continuum by the same agents at the same time was . . . the same.

It wasn’t. One was kid gloves, the other was scorched earth. The candidate they hoped would win got the former; the candidate they needed to “stop” got the latter. The candidate they were almost certain would win got the case dropped; the candidate they needed an “insurance policy” against . . . well, whaddya know — the case against him is still going . . . and going . . . and going.

Did bias have anything to do with that? In 568 pages that leave out the Trump half of the story, we’re told the answer is, “Who really knows?”

I think we know.

Link

quote:

Originally posted by Flashlightboy:
For all of you that wanted the IG to dress up and play Rambo with the players I'm just going to come right out and say it - you're idiots.

For all of you who think the IG and his report are impartial and objective - you're idiots.

Huber will be no different. He is a swamp creature "investigating" other swamp creatures.

All of this is just more evidence of Sessions' complete failure to do his job. He is adamant about not appointing a special counsel to look into any of this. He doesn't want the swamp drained nor its secrets revealed. He is Trump's worst mistake to date.

quote:

Originally posted by Bigboreshooter:

He is Trump's worst mistake to date.

Oh, I hope so!

JALLEN's post a few above w the Andrew McCarthy article is a really good one.

You can't understand how the individual pieces fit without viewing the big picture. We have some REP congress people who are doing that, but it seems nonexistent at the FBI or DoJ.

The biggest message we get from FBI/DoJ is obstruction to keep the public in the dark.

I have been emailing the WH to declassify:

- all of the text messages
- the FISA warrant application against Carter Page
- the EC that started the Russia collusion investigation

Devin Nunes yesterday revealed that an FBI whistle blower told his House Intel Committee in late Sept 2016 that the FBI had found thousands of Clinton texts on Weiner's laptop. This is the info that McCabe kept hidden until the NY prosecutors asked where was the search warrant.

Nunes said they had no one to go to w the information. He said it was classified and he can only say it now because it came out in the IG report.

video at:

https://www.realclearpolitics...._of_obstruction.html

Ironic how the Nixon tapes and Watergate are so ingrained in history for what went missing, then found out, and here we have a report compiled on what was found out - yet, it's being missed (on purpose).

The IG is not impartial, JALLEN is 100% correct, and the backup proofs & links are crystal clear. The interpretations of the report is the truth, not the actual IG report (thank you for posting it all). Watergate was amateur hour compared to this miscarriage.

Unfortunately, you actually have to read through everything to understand. Most people can't even....oh, look, a squirrel……...

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
JALLEN's post a few above w the Andrew McCarthy article is a really good one.

You can't understand how the individual pieces fit without viewing the big picture. We have some REP congress people who are doing that, but it seems nonexistent at the FBI or DoJ.

The biggest message we get from FBI/DoJ is obstruction to keep the public in the dark.

I have been emailing the WH to declassify:

- all of the text messages
- the FISA warrant application against Carter Page
- the EC that started the Russia collusion investigation

Devin Nunes yesterday revealed that an FBI whistle blower told his House Intel Committee in late Sept 2016 that the FBI had found thousands of Clinton texts on Weiner's laptop. This is the info that McCabe kept hidden until the NY prosecutors asked where was the search warrant.

Nunes said they had no one to go to w the information. He said it was classified and he can only say it now because it came out in the IG report.

video at:

https://www.realclearpolitics...._of_obstruction.html

“If they don’t know what we are doing, they don’t know what we are doing wrong.” — Sir Arnold Robinson GCMG CVO MA

this is a painful post for me.

I have tried to believe Jeff Sessions would come out of this mess w his reputation in good shape.

But I give up. He is part of the problem.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-g...f-fbi-director-wray/

“I was real proud of Chris Wray, the new director of the FBI, yesterday for his statements on the IG report,” Sessions told Lackawanna College. “We’re not going to be defensive. We’re going to confront any problems, and we’re going to deal with them one-by-one, in a proper, fair, and appropriate way.”

“We’re going to reaffirm and recommit ourselves to the first ideals of that great agency — the FBI — One of the greatest investigative agency, maybe the greatest in the history of the world, as far as I’m concerned,” he added. “If we make a mistake, we’re going to confront it.”

“While the Inspector General didn’t find any evidence of political bias or improper consideration impacting the investigation under review, all of us at the FBI take this report seriously, and we accept its findings and recommendations, Wray said.

“We’ve already taken steps to address many of the concerns it raises. We’ll change what we need to change and improve what can be made better and stronger, and we’ll move forward with renewed focus and determination. Because that is the essence of the FBI — we learn from the past, we get better at what we need to do, and we continually strive to be the very best we can be,” he added.

Wray also said the report found “errors in judgment” and policy violations, but it found no evidence of political bias or improper consideration “actually impacting the investigations under review.”

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The present leaders of the FBI and DoJ do not recognize or acknowledge there is an ongoing two year old conspiracy to falsely impeach Donald Trump.

The perceived reputation of the FBI/DoJ is more important to them than preserving the integrity of the 2016 presidential election.

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
this is a painful post for me.

I have tried to believe Jeff Sessions would come out of this mess w his reputation in good shape.

But I give up. He is part of the problem.

^^^ THIS ^^^

In the past I have been a Sessions defender, no more.

Appears to me that most folks here consider Sessions to be an all around disaster. And I agree. My belief is Trump is waiting until after the November elections to do anything about it. We will see.

quote:

“If we make a mistake, we’re going to confront it.”

TRANSLATION: "Going forward, our agents will be issued burner phones."

quote:

Originally posted by Flashlightboy:
For all of you that wanted the IG to dress up and play Rambo with the players I'm just going to come right out and say it - you're idiots.

So what exactly idiotic about wanting the IG removed when IG found absolutely no partisan bias within the FBI when it is clearly corrupt?

Are you so daft that you missed the part of the FBI agents all colluding to keep Trump from winning the election?

You are so quick to call me an idiot when you are continuously obtuse.

quote:

Originally posted by Bassamatic:
Appears to me that most folks here consider Sessions to be an all around disaster. And I agree. My belief is Trump is waiting until after the November elections to do anything about it. We will see.

Regardless of what we, or The Donald, think of Jeff Sessions as AG, replacing him and/or Deputy Rosenstein will be a very daunting and complicated piece of work, with the Senate divided as it is between God Damned Commies, Trumpets and Never Trumps, depending on how one counts.

Will it get better? Or worse? Only the Shadow knows, and he ain’t saying.

As much criticism as he is drawing, at least he seems to be doing a reasonable job with the other challenges facing the DOJ.

As I understand it, there is only one Senate confirmed officer in DOJ other than the top two. It’s not a good situation that short handed.

quote:

Will it get better? Or worse? Only the Shadow knows, and he ain’t saying.

That is the question right there (I used to listen to The Shadow when I was a kid, still have lots of tapes! Nice call back!)

I am not a Sessions fan, at all. I said months ago that after the IG report I would give Sessions and Huber time to work. Am I confident? Not at all. But let's see what Huber has to bring.

My opinion? Give them until the election. Then after, no matter how it falls, make a decision to fire or retain. Getting another AG confirmed will be trouble but if it needs to happen, it needs to happen. At that time if nothing is moving forward it's better to try than to stick with a losing hand.

When I think about and I have not lost sight of this...today, we are so much better off in this country, than we were on November 7, 2016...no matter what, keep this in the forefront!

In this video President Trump says he's "Uninvolved" in the DOJ and FBI problems. He repeats this many time- Uninvolved. 9:56 onward........10:14, 10:20 + 10:35.

The reporter asks many times "Your FBI".

He says at some point he might have to get involved.

http://www.foxnews.com/politic...reports-release.html

I agree that Andy McCarthy has it absolutely right. He is always the first source I look for when news like this comes out.

Now it's possible, since the IG does not have the authority to prosecute, that the IG report will be used by US attorneys to investigate and possibly indict. I hope so, but I will not be waiting up to hear that news.