Even critics of the deep state were shocked when Inspector General Michael Horowitz submitted his Report investigating the FBI, the U.S. Government’s most iconic bureaucracy. And the corresponding statements by Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham promised that when the final facts were disclosed, the damage to Washington’s bureaucratic reputation would be even greater.
The hometown Washington Post tried to minimize the bureaucratic failure by emphasizing in its headline that Horowitz found the FBI did pass the minimum bar for beginning an investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign. Even so it could not ignore the IG also reporting that the information given to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was not accurate or complete and its procedures were flawed. Such applications to the Courts were necessary for the FBI to begin and continue spying on Americans like Carter Page and other campaign officials but Horowitz concluded they contained 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” and “failed to meet the basic obligation” to ensure the applications were “scrupulously accurate.”
Indeed, the IG continued, “So many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked teams on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations that was briefed to the highest levels within the FBI,” it represented a failure of “not only the operational team, but also of the managers and supervisors, including senior officials in the chain of command.”
Barr and Durham even contested whether the FBI met the original minimal standards necessary to begin such a sensitive investigation and, in response to a later Senate hearing questioning Horowitz himself, conceded that other reasonable observers could conclude there was more than simple incompetence in initiating and pursuing the investigation.
