Republican political strategist Rick Wilson said that the newly released report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz about allegations of surveillance abuses during the Trump-Russia investigation will be lost among other scandals.
Wilson, who is a conservative critic of President Trump, wrote an opinion piece for Medium on Monday that contended the report fell flat of expectations from Trump’s supporters and from how some in the media characterized its pending publication.
“Well, the report has finally been released, and the results are underwhelming, to put it mildly,” Wilson said. “As has happened time and again, Trump’s ludicrously overwrought promise — that this was to be a tentpole of his ongoing (and entirely imaginary) war against the deep state — was followed by an utterly underwhelming outcome.”
Wilson said that after its publication, Trump’s defenders will “try their best to polish this turd into a diamond.”
“The chances are slim, however, that they’ll be able to convince even their own audience of credulous Trump rubes and conspiracy nuts that this report means all that much,” he said.
“Like a fart in a hurricane, the Horowitz report will soon be lost in the roiling chaos of a Washington, D.C., in the midst of serial and parallel crises all caused by the hand of Donald Trump,” Wilson wrote, pointing out that recent poll numbers show rising support for Trump’s removal from office.
In his 476-page report, Horowitz found that the counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s team was correctly authorized and that political bias didn’t influence the investigation. Horowitz was looking into whether there was Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse in monitoring former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Although he found the investigation was justified, Horowitz did say that the bureau made “at least 17 significant errors or omissions” in the FISA applications. Wilson said that despite the errors and omissions, some in the media “oversold the hell out of” the report and what it might contain.
“We were promised an earthshaking, absolutely cataclysmic political bomb that would destroy the deep state forever and trace a line of political malfeasance from the bowels of the intelligence community right to Barack Obama’s desk,” Wilson wrote. “Far from being a sweeping attack on their entire Trump-Russia investigation, Trump fluffers will be disappointed to find that the Carter Page FISA operation was — wait for it — entirely justified.”
He concluded, “The Horowitz report, far from fulfilling the fantasies of the Trump squad, fell flat, showing that the deep state wasn’t trying to do Trump in, but rather were merely doing their jobs.”
Former FBI Director James Comey also penned his own opinion piece on Monday, which went after Attorney General William Barr and said that “those who smeared the FBI are due for an accounting.”
