I wonder if Barr will admit Horowitz has exonerated Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Page, Obama, Mueller, Strzok, et al. like he did for Trump after the Mueller investigation.
Uhh, he hasn't.
From Jonathon Turley:
Horowitz report is damning for the FBI and unsettling for the rest of us.
Given the Agency Friendly Standards Horowitz is compelled to use, he cannot say it was inappropriate to start the investigation, HOWEVER, United States Attorney John Durham, who is heading the parallel investigation at the Justice Department, took the unusual step to issue a statement that he did not believe the evidence supported that conclusion at the very beginning of the investigation.
Attorney General
William Barr also issued a statement disagreeing with the threshold statement. In fact, the Justice Department has a standard that requires the least intrusive means of investigating such entities as presidential campaigns, particularly when it comes to campaigns of the opposing party. That threshold finding is then followed by the remainder of the report, which is highly damaging and unsettling.
Horowitz finds a litany of false and even falsified representations used to continue the secret investigation targeting the Trump campaign and its associates.
How can you describe that as "exoneration"?
This is akin to reviewing the Titanic and saying that the captain was not unreasonable in starting the voyage. The question is what occurred when the icebergs began appearing. Horowitz says that investigative icebergs appeared rather early on, and the Justice Department not only failed to report that to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court but removed evidence that its investigation was on a collision course with the facts.
Remember when Trump said the DOJ was spying on him?
Horowitz describes poorly founded investigations that included undercover FBI agents and a variety of different sources.
From the outset, the Justice Department failed to interview several key individuals or vet critical information and sources in the Steele dossier. Justice Department officials insisted to Horowitz that they choose not to interview campaign officials because they were unsure if the campaign was compromised and did not want to tip off the Russians. However, the inspector general report says the Russians were directly told about the allegations repeatedly by then CIA Director John Brennan and, ultimately, President Obama. So the Russians were informed, but no one contacted the Trump campaign so as not to inform the Russians? Meanwhile, the allegations quickly fell apart. Horowitz details how all of the evidence proved exculpatory of any collusion or conspiracy with the Russians.
Notice he does not say that SOME of the evidence proved exculpatory, but that ALL the evidence proved exculpatory, but FISC was not notified and the nation was put through a 3 year witch hunt with Fake News regularly claiming that any day unimpeachable evidence was going to be produced "proving" that Trump was in a criminal conspiracy with and under the control of Vladimir Putin.
Even worse, another agency that appears to be the CIA told the FBI that Page was actually working for the agency in Russia as an “operational contact” gathering intelligence. The FBI was told this repeatedly, yet it never reported it to the FISA court approving the secret investigation of Page. His claim to have worked with the federal government was widely dismissed. Worse yet, Horowitz found that investigators and the Justice Department concluded there was no probable cause on Page to support its FISA investigation. That is when there was an intervention from the top of the FBI, ordering investigators to look at the Steele dossier funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign instead.
So the DOJ is telling FISC (FISA COURT) that Page's contacts are probable cause to believe he is working as a foreign spy against the United States and the DOJ hides from FISC that he is actuallyh working FOR the CIA gather information for them about Russia? That doesn't seem important? The FBI was told this repeatedly, yet through an initial FISA warrant and three renewals, they, each time, concealed this from the Court? Any idea WHY they hid this from the Court? I have a guess: Because they wouldn't have gotten the spy warrant if they told the truth! But they are all "exonerated"!
Who told investigators to turn to the dossier? Former FBI Deputy Director
Andrew McCabe. He was fired over his conduct in the investigation after earlier internal investigations. Horowitz contradicts the media claim that the dossier was just a small part of the case presented to the FISA court. He finds that it was essential to seeking FISA warrants. Horowitz also finds no sharing of information with FISA judges that undermined the credibility of the dossier or Christopher Steele himself. Surprisingly little effort was made to fully investigate the dossier when McCabe directed investigators to it, yet investigators soon learned that critical facts reported to the FISA court were false. FISA judges were told that a Yahoo News article was an independent corroboration of the Steele dossier, but Horowitz confirms that Steele was the source of that article. Therefore, Steele was used to corroborate Steele on allegations that were later deemed unfounded.
And the FBI hid that from the Court as well, on ALL FOUR FISA applications. And Lying Andy? He's now a Fake News Contributor.
The report also said that Steele was viewed as reliable and was used as a source in prior cases, yet Horowitz found no support for that and, in fact, found that the past representations of Steele were flagged as unreliable. His veracity was not the only questionable thing unveiled in the report. Steele relied on a character who, Horowitz determined, had a dubious reputation and may have been under investigation as a possible double agent for Russia. Other instances were also clearly misrepresented.
They are all "exonerated"!
The source relied on by Steele was presented as conveying damaging information on Trump. When this source was interviewed, he said he had no direct information and was conveying bar talk. He denied telling other details to Steele. This was all known to the Justice Department, but it still asked for warrant renewals from the FISA court without correcting the record or revealing exculpatory information discovered by investigators. That included the failure to tell the court that Page was working with the CIA. Finally, Horowitz found that an FBI lawyer doctored a critical email to hide the fact that Page was really working for us and not the Russians.
Fake News Screams "EXONERATED"! and parrots chirp it out in unison:
Despite this shockingly damning report, much of the media is reporting only that Horowitz did not find it unreasonable to start the investigation, and ignoring a litany of false representations and falsifications of evidence to keep the secret investigation going. Nothing was found to support any of those allegations, and special counsel
Robert Mueller also confirmed there was no support for collusion and conspiracy allegations repeated continuously for two years by many experts and members of Congress.
