IG report shows Russia hoax a coup attempt: Devine
December 11, 2019 | 10:34pm | UpdatedEnlarge Image
Justice Department Inspector General Michael HorowitzAFP via Getty Images
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Inspector General Michael Horowitz finally damned the FBI during his testimony Wednesday when he said he would be “skeptical” that there was anything accidental in the egregious catalog of errors the bureau committed in its spying operation on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
It took five hours of questioning about the FBI’s motivations, but Horowitz, prudent and impartial as he is, finally delivered the money shot.
Asked by Republican Sen. Mike Crapo if the 17 “significant errors or omissions” he found in the FBI’s surveillance operation could possibly be “accidental,” Horowitz said: “I would be skeptical.”
He went on to explain that “the answers we got were not satisfactory [so] we’re left trying to understand how could all these errors have occurred over a nine-month period on three teams hand-picked, on … the highest-profile case of the FBI, going to the very top of the organization, involving a presidential campaign.”
Horowitz described the conduct of the FBI as “inexplicable” when its operatives bent the rules to try to prove Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia.
But sadly, the FBI’s conduct is all too explicable. It can be explained by the proven anti-Trump bias of its personnel, hand-picked to run Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI operation to spy on the Trump campaign using salacious opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Horowitz’s testimony confirms suspicions that the Russia-collusion hoax amounted to an attempted coup against Trump and laid the groundwork for impeachment.
“It’s Trump today,” Sen. Lindsay Graham said in a blistering opening statement before he began questioning Horowitz. “It could be you or me tomorrow … if they can do this to the candidate for the president of the United States, what could they do to you? The Trump presidency will end in a year or five years … but we can’t write this off as being just about one man or one event. We’ve got to understand how off the rails the system got.”
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As evidence of FBI motivation for coming after Trump, Graham read aloud text messages between lead agent Peter Stzrok and lead lawyer Lisa Page.
March 3, 2016, Page: “God, Trump is a loathsome human.”
Strzok: ‘‘OMG, he’s an idiot.”
July 16, Page: “Wow, Donald Trump is an enormous douche.”
July 19, Stzrok: “Trump is a disaster.”
Aug. 8, Page: “He’s not ever going to become president, right?”
Strzok: “No. No, he won’t. We’ll stop it.”
Aug. 15, Strzok: “I want to believe the path you threw out in [their then-boss Andrew McCabe’s] office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
Aug. 26, Strzok: “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could smell the Trump supporters.”
These were the people in charge of the Trump spying operation.
Horowitz was not willing to speculate about their motivations. But Graham gave it a shot: “They were on a mission not to protect Trump, but to protect us from Trump … to protect all of us smelly people from Donald Trump.”
This was the FBI run by James “J. Edgar” Comey, who sees himself as a superior moral being. Maybe it was true once. But he lost his way. Terrible things happened on his watch.
After Horowitz’s testimony, the conclusions are inescapable.
The FBI knowingly and fraudulently obtained warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. In one instance, an FBI lawyer doctored an email to trick the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into authorizing the surveillance. The FBI used the Steele dossier, a farcical farrago of salacious stories about Trump cavorting with prostitutes in Moscow, as a “central and essential” justification in its lengthy wiretap of Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
The FBI knew the dossier, written by discredited former British spy Christopher Steele, had been paid for by Clinton’s campaign, and knew there were “significant questions about [its] reliability,” yet never told the court.
This is all in Horowitz’s report and you would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to acknowledge a deliberate campaign to damage Trump.
It is just not in Horowitz’s job description to make that leap. He properly says that his report lays out the evidence and “people are free to consider, evaluate what they think people’s motivations were.”
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When it comes to FBI misconduct in applying for warrants to wiretap Page, Horowitz wasn’t certain whether it was “sheer gross incompetence that led to this versus intentional misconduct and anything in between.”
“What the motivations are I can’t tell you as I sit here today because I don’t have enough evidence to reach that conclusion.”
Either way, it was shocking.
We owe a debt of gratitude to then-House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes, maligned by Democratic patsies as a hick dairy farmer when he wrote his February 2018 memo about the FBI’s misconduct. He has been thoroughly vindicated by Horowitz.
But his Democratic counterpart, current Chairman Adam Schiff, shamelessly continues to defend the sham and malign Nunes. He even subpoenaed and published Nunes’ phone records gratuitously in the impeachment inquiry last week.
Last year, Schiff read aloud from the Steele dossier during a House hearing into allegations of Trump’s Russia collusion. He pretended Steele was a credible figure.
Schiff is a darling of the Beltway media, but a liability to the Democrats, making them look like two-bit scam artists acting in bad faith.
His boss, Nancy Pelosi, is as bad. Every chance she gets, she says that “all roads lead to Putin” when it comes to Trump. It is the very basis of her
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