It’s laughable for Inspector General Michael Horowitz to assert in his report that he found no political bias in the FBI’s spying of President Trump’s 2016 campaign. Of course he did. He simply refused to call it by its name.
Most of the national media are framing the report released this week as a disappointment for Trump because he and his supporters had expected it to blow the lid off pervasive misconduct and animus in the FBI toward the president. But the thing is, it more or less does that, even if it doesn’t offer the colorful language journalists need in order to see it for themselves.
Horowitz inexplicably stated early in his report that his office “did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the FBI’s decision” to begin surveilling Trump campaign associate Carter Page back in 2016.
Yet, just three pages later, the report says that Horowitz’s investigation found seven times where FBI agents relied on “inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported” information in order to continually seek reauthorization for the surveillance of Page and others in the campaign.
News coverage has framed this as a matter of paperwork errors or laziness that plagued an otherwise normal and above-board process. But that’s not the case. The report makes very clear that agents who were working on this investigation were overlooking inconvenient details and even withholding important information from the FISA court, which authorizes the spying, in order to continue justifying the project.
In one instance, Horowitz notes that the FBI’s original theory (since debunked) that Carter Page was a Russian agent was complicated by his denials to intelligence sources of having met with a pair of Russian oligarchs, whom the FBI believed had in fact been in touch with Page. When the FBI wanted re-authorization to continue spying on Page, it concealed Page’s denials from the court.
When relying on information provided by Christopher Steele, the former British spy and author of the Steele dossier, to seek surveillance reauthorization, the FBI told the FISA court that Steele’s reporting was “corroborated and used in criminal proceedings.” As Horowitz writes, this characterization was misleading. The FBI “overstated the significance of Steele’s past reporting” and that the intelligence provided by Steele had not even been approved for use in the re-authorization application by the agent who supervised him.
Does any of this sound like a textbook investigation that may have only suffered a few clerical errors? No, it sounds a lot like a sham operation conducted by agents who deliberately cooked the books in order to continue an unwarranted probe of a major, if unlikely, presidential candidate.
Horowitz’s ridiculous declaration that there was no “political bias or improper motivation” in the FBI’s spying on the Trump campaign is simply not true, and anyone who actually reads his report knows it.
