Washington – Last week toward the end of the week there appeared in our finest newspapers — the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — a spate of news stories that set official Washington’s mind at ease. As one of the great gazettes put it, “The Justice Department’s internal watchdog [that would be Inspector General Michael Horowitz] is expected to find in a forthcoming report that political bias did not taint top officials running the FBI investigation into possible coordination between Russian and the Trump campaign in 2016.” Nonetheless, the report will be criticizing “the bureau for systematic failures in its handling of surveillance applications, according to two U.S. officials.”
We shall have to wait until December 9 to hear from Inspector General Horowitz as to what those “systematic failures” were. Do these early reports on his work forecast a whitewash? It would appear so. But can anyone really take seriously that those “systematic failures” took place in the absence of bias? Such a claim requires a great deal of contortion. And the spate of stories last week suggest the form that contortion will take: blame will fall not on Peter “We Will Stop Him” Strzok, the virulent Trump-hater who orchestrated the spying on the Trump campaign, but on a low-level lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith. We are led to believe by these stories that while Clinesmith was biased against Trump — Trump’s victory had “devastated him,” he wrote in an email — that bias never “tainted” his work or infected any of his colleagues. Many of them, incidentally, are on record as sharing his bias. He was, you see, simply sloppy, or so the report is purported to say.
I read these happy, trouble-free news stories very carefully, and one thing struck me. Nowhere in any of the stories did anyone bother to ask the question: What precisely triggered the need for this investigation of the investigators? It did not start in a vacuum. Was it not largely precipitated by the discovery of the FBI’s pervasive use of the Hillary-financed Steele dossier upon which the Strzoks of this world relied for their spying on Trump officials, all of whom turned out not to be Russian agents, as the FBI alleged?
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(1) Are Thought Crimes Impeachable?
(2) FISA report drop could scramble Trump impeachment effort
(5) O.K., Prince Andrew’s out of public life. Why isn’t Bill Clinton?
My low expectations ensure I will not be disappointed.