Michael Horowitz admitted over and over during a Senate hearing on Wednesday that he didn’t know the answers to the most important questions regarding his investigation of the FBI’s spying on President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Why, then, was he so confident in his conclusions that despite some issues here and there, everything there was above board?
Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, said in his report this week he found no evidence that FBI agents who conducted the investigation of Trump’s campaign were motivated by political bias against the president. He also said, despite scores of problems with the legal authorization and reauthorization of that investigation, it was nonetheless justified under department rules.
He restated those conclusions on Wednesday, even while conceding that he didn’t know why the FBI was so keen to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page, who was in fact not a Russian agent after all; that he didn’t know why they continued to spy on Page, even after the FBI was informed by the CIA that Page had actually been working for them as an informant; and that he didn’t know why, when the FBI continually sought to have its investigation reauthorized by the FISA court, it routinely withheld information from the court or straight up lied about things that might have undermined the investigation.
No matter how you cut it, the only possible conclusion is that one or more agents were literally lying in court to continue their spying on the Trump campaign.
“They certainly were misleading to the court,” Horowitz said in his testimony.
Oh, OK — but there was no bias in their lies? This was all above board?
Give me a break.
Horowitz admits that he didn’t know enough to draw those conclusions, so he shouldn’t have done so.
