Dear Commons Community,
A long-awaited report by the Justice Department’s inspector general delivers a scathing critique of the F.B.I.’s handling of a wiretap application but also punctures conspiracy theories. F.B.I. officials had sufficient reason to open the investigation into links between Russia and Trump campaign aides in 2016 and acted without political bias, a long-awaited report said on Monday, but it concluded that the inquiry was a rushed and dysfunctional process marked by serious errors in documents related to a wiretap.
The exhaustive report by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, faced an immediate challenge. Attorney General William P. Barr sought to undermine the key finding that investigators had an adequate basis to open the inquiry, known as Crossfire Hurricane.
“The inspector general’s report now makes clear that the F.B.I. launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” Mr. Barr, a close ally of President Trump who has begun his own re-investigation of the Russia inquiry, said in a statement.
Yet Mr. Horowitz stressed that the standard for opening an F.B.I. investigation was low — echoing the sort of criticism that civil libertarians have made for years. He also exonerated former F.B.I. leaders, broadly rejecting Mr. Trump’s accusations that they engaged in a politicized conspiracy to sabotage him.
“We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced” officials’ decision to open the investigation, the report said.
At the same time, Mr. Horowitz’s report was scathing about other aspects of the sprawling inquiry, documenting serious and systematic problems with the F.B.I.’s handling of applications to win court orders to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser. Mr. Horowitz said investigators appeared to overstate the strength of their applications, and he separately referred one low-ranking F.B.I. lawyer for possible prosecution for altering a related document.
By puncturing conspiracy theories promoted by Mr. Trump and his allies, yet sharply criticizing law enforcement actions that have not been the subject of public debate, Mr. Horowitz’s mixed findings offered a basis for both critics and allies of Mr. Trump to claim vindication. The report by an independent official presented a definitive accounting of the F.B.I.’s actions in the early stages of the Russia investigation.
The report’s basic premise has Trump fuming!
Tony
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
