Inspecting the Inspector General

The Senate and the House of Representatives this week are poring over the OIG report on the Clinton email “investigation.” Committee hearings featuring Inspector General Horowitz and/or FBI Director Wray took place yesterday and today.

So far, some representatives of the People are doing a good job interrogating the representatives of the DOJ and FBI. (Others, not so much.)

We the People need, in fact demand, justice. It’s not going to be enough to promise that the DOJ and FBI are taking steps to make sure this (ill-defined but obviously corrupt) behavior never happens again.

Yes, clean up the process to ensure that we no longer have a DOJ, FBI, and CIA that can be so easily weaponized against the political opponents of a president and his party.

But the only way to ensure that this never happens again is for public punishment with extreme prejudice. That means prison time.

Also so far, there seems to be little hope that the main players in the weaponization of the intelligence community, among other agencies of the Obama administration, will be prosecuted, much less punished. That means Clinton, Obama, Lynch, Brennan, Clapper, at the very least.

Perhaps Andrew McCabe will be prosecuted. Perhaps James Comey, allegedly being investigated for his handling of the memos he created right after meeting with President Trump, may be prosecuted. Perhaps eventually Lisa Page and Peter Strzok will face charges.

Chump change. A fish rots from the head down. We need to see big fish perp walked.

The Inspector General testified that there are still investigations ongoing–including FISA abuse; leaks of classified information and leaks about investigations; FBI collusion with the media (my phrase, but that’s the gist of it); and bribery of agents, among other potential crimes.

Unbelievably, the OIG states that there were so many potential scofflaws in the (fake) Clinton email investigation that the FBI/DOJ simply decided not to investigate all suspects:

“We found that the FBI team and the prosecutors decided together to generally limit the devices they sought to those that either belonged to Clinton or were used to back-up or cull Clinton’s emails,” the report states on page 153.

“The team provided, among others, the following reasons for placing this limitation on the scope of the investigation: (1) the culture of mishandling classified information at the State Department which made the quantity of potential sources of evidence particularly vast; (2) the belief that Clinton’s own devices and the laptops used to cull her emails were the most likely places to find the complete collection of her emails from her tenure as Secretary of State; and (3) the belief that the State Department was the better entity to conduct a ‘spill investigation.’” …

Tom Rogan at the Washington Examiner encapsulated it best:

“Put another way, the agents thought that they might find so much classified information on unauthorized servers and systems that they would become lost in the maze.” …

So, apparently many of the potential criminals will skate, just as Hillary Clinton skated.

Zuiderzee time, folks. Zuiderzee.

Imagine the irony: The team of FBI agents and DOJ lawyers assigned to investigate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server and unsecured personal email accounts for government business, her mishandling of classified information, and her destruction of evidence, themselves are now found to have done exactly the same thing!

(Knowing they were guilty of the same conduct for which they were allegedly investigating Clinton, why didn’t they recuse themselves? “No bias to see here, folks. Move on.” But I digress …)

James Comey, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, and probably others (such as Obama), were found to have used personal email accounts and/or personal, non-government devices to conduct official public business (probably deliberately so as to evade discovery).

Many Page/Strzok work-related text messages, sent on personal or government phones, have apparently not been recovered nor, as per the law, preserved in a government database.

On the contrary, a good many of the Page/Strzok communications went missing and remain missing. In particular, and quite unbelievably conveniently, there’s a gap in the record for the most important period of time for Congress and OIG investigators to examine–the period of time leading up to the initiation of the “counter-intelligence” investigation of President Trump’s campaign–the very period within which FBI informants were contacting and enticing several Trump campaign members with promises of “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Was it a plan? An “insurance policy?”

Strzok told his seemingly distraught paramour, Page, in August 2016 that Donald Trump would never become president because

We’ll stop it.

Senator Lindsey Graham pointed out yesterday what is obvious by now to most who are paying attention (and who are intellectually honest):

That’s exactly what’s happening here, folks. You cannot hold her criminally liable and stop him. 

Horowitz says that they found no documentary or testimonial evidence that the bias of numerous FBI agents and DOJ lawyers affected the decisions made in the Clinton investigation. That’s no surprise, considering that many of them deliberately used personal phones and personal laptops to do their “work;” that they failed to save what should have been saved in government databases; and that, conveniently for the conspirators, much evidence has simply gone missing, been kept from Congress and the public, or got lost via technical “glitches.”

Who’s going to testify that they made biased decisions for political reasons, using the power of the government to affect an election? Duh!

Just a month after Strzok promised his lover that they’d stop Trump from becoming president, thousands of Hillary Clinton emails were discovered on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. These were government records and, in some instances, classified communications that should never have been transmitted to a personal laptop, much less still exist on a computer in Weiner’s apartment years after Clinton left office.

Peter Strzok was in charge of the Clinton email investigation. Peter Strzok was apparently an initiator if not the initiator of the trumped-up “counterintelligence” investigation into Trump’s campaign, an investigation that Strzok began no sooner than James Comey exonerated Hillary Clinton.

When the emails were found on the Weiner laptop, the FBI sat on them for a month, doing nothing. Peter Strzok would have been and should have been instrumental in reopening the Clinton investigation. However, the Inspector General reported that Strzok decided instead to prioritize the Trump investigation and ignore the Weiner laptop. The Inspector General’s report said that the “we’ll stop it” text message

is not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects. This is antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Department of Justice.

The text also implies a willingness to take no action, such as reopening the Clinton investigation, but instead to run out the clock, while his team prioritized the “insurance policy” they devised–that being the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign.

Strategic action and inaction. Both serving to, the team hoped, “stop” Trump from becoming president.

The Inspector General is now investigating the actions taken or not taken by Strzok and his team after they began to investigate Trump’s campaign. Another report is forthcoming.

Perhaps related to that investigation, we learned late today that Agent Strzok was escorted from his office last Friday. What this means, is anyone’s guess. Was he finally fired? Will he testify before Congress?

Let’s hope that justice is served soon.

We the People expect nothing less than equal justice under the law.

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