The Department of Justice’s Inspector General Michael Horowitz is allegedly going to come out with a report that is like the past four reports he put out – uneventful and definitely not historic as the President said [although, he might have meant the Durham report as one of our readers mentioned]. At least that’s what we glean from the NY Times.
The NY Times writes, A highly anticipated report by the Justice Department’s inspector general is expected to sharply criticize lower-level F.B.I. officials as well as bureau leaders involved in the early stages of the Trump-Russia investigation, but to absolve the top ranks of abusing their powers out of bias against President Trump, according to people briefed on a draft.
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The lawyer who altered a document is Kevin Clinesmith, a low-level official
Investigators for the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, uncovered errors and omissions in documents related to the wiretapping of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page — including that a low-level lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, altered an email that officials used to prepare to seek court approval to renew the wiretap, the people said.
It was sloppy, unprofessional, and careless. That’s it.
More broadly, Mr. Horowitz’s report, to be made public on Dec. 9, portrays the overall effort to seek the wiretap order and its renewals as sloppy and unprofessional, according to the people familiar with it. He will also sharply criticize as careless one of the F.B.I. case agents in New York handling the matter and say that the bureau and the Justice Department displayed poor coordination during the investigation, they said.
Forget all those ‘conspiracy theories’
At the same time, however, the report debunks a series of conspiracy theories and insinuations about the F.B.I. that Mr. Trump and his allies have put forward over the past two years…
Comey and McCabe are in the clear
In particular, while Mr. Horowitz criticizes F.B.I. leadership for its handling of the highly fraught Russia investigation in some ways, he made no finding of politically biased actions by top officials Mr. Trump has vilified like the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey; Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy who temporarily ran the bureau after the president fired Mr. Comey in 2017; and Peter Strzok, a former top counterintelligence agent.
President Trump prematurely told the Fox & Friends audience this morning that the findings would be ‘historic,’ but that doesn’t appear to be the case
And in other crucial respects, the draft inspector general report is said not to corroborate conspiracy theories and insinuations offered by Mr. Trump and his allies about the early stages of the Russia investigation, before Mr. Mueller was appointed as special counsel and took it over.
Spy Joseph Mifsud, Steele, the dossier, MEH!
For example, the draft report also concludes that the F.B.I. had enough evidence to meet the legal standard for opening the investigation, though Mr. Horowitz emphasized that the bar is low, the people said.
The report is also said to conclude that Joseph Mifsud, a Russia-linked professor who told a Trump campaign official that Russia had damaging information on Mrs. Clinton in the form of hacked Democratic emails — a key fact used to open the investigation — was not an F.B.I. informant. That undercuts an assertion of conservative critics of the inquiry.
None of the evidence used to open the investigation came from the C.I.A. or from a notorious dossier of claims about Trump-Russia ties compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent whose research was funded by Democrats, the report concludes, according to the people briefed on it.
This is from a draft released to the NY Times and there could be more to it, but Horowitz’s other reports are exactly like this. Fast & Furious, Benghazi, the bias in the FBI, and so on were all very similar. He tends to write up all these examples of misbehavior and conclude no one’s responsible as in the case of Benghazi or he says the targets were biased but it didn’t affect anything.
One caveat, this is from fake news NY Times
wpDiscuz
