RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/ig-report-fbi-no-bias-conclusion-may-not-supported/But who knows?

You’ve got to hand it to Michael Horowitz: The Justice Department inspector general’s much-anticipated report on the Clinton-emails investigation may be half-baked, but if it is, it is the most comprehensive, meticulously detailed, carefully documented, thoughtfully reasoned epic in the history of half-bakery.

Why say do I say the report “may be half-baked”? Why don’t I just come out and declare, “The report is half-baked”? Well, I figure if I write this column in the IG’s elusive style, we’ll have the Rosetta Stone we need to decipher the report.

See, you probably sense that I believe the report is half-baked. But if I say it “may be” half-baked . . . well, technically that means it may not be, too. I mean, who really knows, right?

If that annoys you, try wading through 568 pages of this stuff, particularly on the central issue of the investigators’ anti-Trump bias. The report acknowledges that contempt for Trump was pervasive among several of the top FBI and DOJ officials making decisions about the investigation. So this deep-seated bias must have affected the decision-making, right? Well, the report concludes, who really knows?

Not in so many words, of course. The trick here is the premise the IG establishes from the start: It’s not my job to draw firm conclusions about why things happened the way they did. In fact, it’s not even my job to determine whether investigative decisions were right or wrong. The cop-out is that we are dealing here with “discretionary” calls; therefore, the IG rationalizes, the investigators must be given very broad latitude. Consequently, the IG says his job is not to determine whether any particular decision was correct; just whether, on some otherworldly scale of reasonableness, the decision was defensible. And he makes that determination by looking at every decision in isolation.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/15/the-fbi-hates-trump-

During his recent book tour, ex-FBI Director James Comey made it clear that he detests Donald Trump.

Comey mocked Trump’s appearance—commenting on his “orange skin” and the bags under his eyes—and compared the president to a mob boss. He said Trump is unfit to be president, and even questioned his marriage. On Twitter, Comey taunts the president with self-aggrandizing tweets and suggests Trump’s day of reckoning will soon arrive. During an interview last spring, Comey’s wife admitted she and her daughters voted for Hillary Clinton and attended the Women’s March to protest Trump’s presidency the day after the inauguration.

But as the old saying goes, a fish rots from its head, and that certainly is the case with Comey’s FBI. (Trump fired Comey in May 2017.) Several passages in the Justice Department’s Inspector General report on the agency’s handling of the Clinton email investigation illustrate the FBI’s culture of contempt for Trump, before and after the election.

Comments from key law enforcement officials—lawyers and investigators—about Trump were vile, demeaning, and childish. But their ridicule was not isolated to Trump. These public servants were unsparing in their contempt for the voters—the very people who fund their salaries and pensions.

The Case of Strzok and Page
Let’s start with Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the FBI lovers who are connected to the Clinton email probe, the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team. We know from previously-reported text exchanges that Strzok and Page harbored a deep disdain for Trump and a political preference for Clinton. The IG report confirms their bias after reviewing more than 40,000 messages between the two:

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12507/aclu-leftist-partisan

The director of the American Civil Liberties Union has now acknowledged what should have been obvious to everybody over the past several years: that the ACLU is no longer a neutral defender of everyone’s civil liberties; it has morphed into a hyper-partisan, hard-left political advocacy group. The final nail in its coffin was the announcement that for the first time in its history the ACLU would become involved in partisan electoral politics, supporting candidates, referenda and other agenda-driven political goals.

The headline in the June 8, 2018 edition of The New Yorker tells it all: “The ACLU is getting involved in elections – and reinventing itself for the Trump Era.” The article continues:

“In this midterm year, however, as progressive groups have mushroomed and grown more active, and as liberal billionaires such as Howard Schultz and Tom Steyer have begun to imagine themselves as political heroes and eye Presidential runs, the A.C.L.U., itself newly flush, has begun to move in step with the times. For the first time in its history, the A.C.L.U. is taking an active role in elections. The group has plans to spend more than twenty-five million dollars on races and ballot initiatives by Election Day, in November.”

Since its establishment nearly 100 years ago, the ACLU has been, in the words of The New Yorker, “Fastidiously nonpartisan, so prudish about any alliance with any political power that its leadership, in the 1980’s and 90’s, declined even to give awards to likeminded legislators for fear that it might give the wrong impression.” I know, because I served on its National Board in the early days of my own career. In those days, the Board consisted of individuals who were deeply committed to core civil liberties, especially freedom of speech, opposition to prosecutorial overreach and political equality. Its Board members included Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, right-wingers and left-wingers — all of whom supported neutral civil liberties.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270466/fbi-ig-report-slap-wrist-joseph-klein

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz has released his 500 plus-page report, which purports to shine a light on the mishandling at top levels of the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation of the 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she served as Secretary of State under former President Obama. Such mishandling included violations of Department of Justice standards and FBI protocols. The report from the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (“OIG”) criticized certain actions and decisions of former FBI Director James Comey, together with those of other senior FBI officials who were involved in the probe, including former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. Mr. McCabe is already the subject of an earlier criminal referral from the OIG for his alleged unauthorized leaks to the media and lying to federal investigators about his media contacts. Special FBI agent Peter Stzrok and Lisa Page, an attorney who has since left the FBI, were targeted in this report for their blatantly anti-Trump text messages. Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch was also criticized for exercising bad judgment in connection with her infamous tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton.

Mr. Horowitz’s report focused on process and procedures. The inspector general made clear when he launched his investigation in January 2017 that “his review will not substitute the OIG’s judgment for the judgments made by the FBI or the Department regarding the substantive merits of investigative or prosecutive decisions.” Moreover, this report did not address whether the Department of Justice or FBI abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to obtain a surveillance order against former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, or the government’s reliance on former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele’s salacious and unverified “dossier” in its FISA court application, which the OIG is investigating separately.