dagblog - Comments for "Inspector general blasts Comey and also says others at FBI 'showed willingness to take official action' to hurt Trump"

Giuliani Promised a Surprise

artappraiser — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 18:21:34 +0000

In reply to Inspector general blasts Comey and also says others at FBI 'showed willingness to take official action' to hurt Trump

Giuliani Promised a Surprise Before the Election. Comey Delivered One.

By Jim Dwyer @ NYTimes.com, June 19

Once, in his days as New York’s chief federal prosecutor and later as the city’s mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani was a master of releasing damaging leaks aimed at the kneecaps of opponents. Sometimes, they were true.

Now Mr. Giuliani works the other end of the information slurry, and he has had a hard time keeping his stories straight, one day boasting of his inside sources, then denying that they exist [....]

Most humans would think that 500 pages ought to cover the subject handily, but this report barely touches on the subject of law enforcement information being dished out to the likes of Mr. Giuliani, who then weaponized it. Another report on leaks is apparently still underway. Mr. Giuliani is not mentioned in the first report, but he has said on television that he was interviewed.

According to the report, witnesses told the inspector general that a fear of leaks from within the F.B.I. drove the agency’s former director, James Comey, to break with established policy against opening or discussing investigations in the run-up to an election. Two weeks before the 2016 election, Mr. Comey disclosed that the F.B.I. discovered a laptop that had not been examined in the original investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

In speaking with the inspector general’s office, Mr. Comey maintained that the threat of leaks was not a factor in his decision, but few of those involved saw it that way, according to the report [.....]

The 500-Page Inspector

artappraiser — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 18:00:05 +0000

In reply to Inspector general blasts Comey and also says others at FBI 'showed willingness to take official action' to hurt Trump

The 500-Page Inspector General’s Report In 900 Words

@ FiveThirtyEight.com, June 15

[....] very quickly, much of the nuance was stripped out; interested parties — President Trump, his supporters, former FBI Director James Comey — all found in the report plenty of ammunition to load the gun they were already holding. Cherrypicking aside, however, the report did come to some conclusions.

So let’s look at the legal, policy and political implications of the report but also try to keep the nuance while losing some of the complexity (and adding some brevity). Here are four key takeaways from those 500+ pages in about 900 words. (Note: The report is overwhelmingly about the Justice Department’s and the FBI’s conduct in the Clinton email probe, not the investigations surrounding Trump or his campaign’s alleged connections to Russia. Inspector General Michael Horowitz is now looking into elements of the Trump investigation.)

1. Comey looks bad procedurally but not legally [....]

Thanks. This is very

rmrd0000 — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 20:09:45 +0000

In reply to Paul Waldman at WaPo today,

Thanks. This is very important.

Paul Waldman at WaPo today,

AmericanDreamer — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 20:04:09 +0000

In reply to Inspector general blasts Comey and also says others at FBI 'showed willingness to take official action' to hurt Trump

Paul Waldman at WaPo today, keeping his eye on the ball:

"There may have been an FBI conspiracy involving the 2016 election. But not the one you think." https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/06/18/there-may-h...

This afternoon, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will testify on Capitol Hill about the lengthy report he issued last week on the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email, but what may be the most important part of the story of the FBI and Clinton in 2016 has gotten almost no attention.

The blizzard of lies and innuendo that President Trump has thrown up around this issue has succeeded in narrowing the questions that get asked to exactly the ones he wants. Was there a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump? Was the FBI unspeakably biased against him? Was the investigation into Russia illegitimate from the beginning? Even if you answer “no” to all of those questions, you’re still talking about what Trump wants you to talk about.

But here’s what we ought to be asking: Did FBI agents in the bureau’s New York office effectively make Donald Trump the president of the United States?

If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, you probably aren’t alone. But let’s look at it this way: You’ve no doubt heard of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the FBI officials who were having an affair and exchanged text messages in which they expressed their mutual distaste for the future president. You’ve heard of them because the Justice Department showed reporters their texts, then conservative media and Trump proceeded to make them famous, despite the fact that there is precisely zero evidence that their personal feelings about Trump biased the investigations they were involved in. The inspector general’s report concludes that whatever Strzok and Page may have said to each other in private, they didn’t do anything about it.

In contrast, a group of FBI agents in the bureau’s New York office seems to have been doing everything it could in the fall of 2016 to make sure Clinton wouldn’t become president. We don’t know their names. We haven’t read their texts. We may eventually learn the full extent of the actions they took, since the inspector general is conducting a separate investigation that involves them. But to this point, it has been something only the most dedicated aficionados of the story of how James B. Comey all but handed Trump the election knew anything about.

.....

Oh, and I await, with bated

AmericanDreamer — Sat, 16 Jun 2018 14:53:59 +0000

In reply to Inspector general blasts Comey and also says others at FBI 'showed willingness to take official action' to hurt Trump

Oh, and I await, with bated breath, an OIG or comparably vigorous, independent investigation into the efforts of individuals in NYC FBI to blackmail FBI Director Comey into re-opening the HRC email investigation days before the election.

Unlike the actions of the pro-Clinton DC FBI individuals examined in this OIG report which the Trump camp is using to lie about the investigation's findings-- where no evidence was found of these influencing the investigation-- the actions of the Giuliani NYC FBI wing are already acknowledged to have had impact on Comey's late October 2016 announcement.

Yet has anyone in NYC FBI been fired for any if those actions? In an impartially functioning law enforcement culture heads there surely would have rolled.

"Why are you lying about it,

artappraiser — Sat, 16 Jun 2018 08:45:19 +0000

In reply to Especially given that I'm

"Why are you lying about it, sir?"
That's what WH transcript of Trump's remarks today TWICE records reporters asking:
1-to his repeated claim IG report "exonerated" him (it had no'g to do w/Russia probe)
2-to his blaming splitting families at border to Dems & a nonexistent law
— Jackie Calmes (@jackiekcalmes) June 15, 2018

This is a bizarre,

artappraiser — Sat, 16 Jun 2018 08:19:44 +0000

In reply to Especially given that I'm

This is a bizarre, pathological, obscene, enormous, mind-numbing, frightening lie. The IG report had absolutely nothing to do with the investigation into Russian collusion or Trump’s alleged obstruction of justice. https://t.co/LTq8mEzHLw
— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) June 15, 2018

Especially given that I'm

artappraiser — Sat, 16 Jun 2018 07:11:18 +0000

In reply to Inspector general blasts Comey and also says others at FBI 'showed willingness to take official action' to hurt Trump

Especially given that I'm pretty sure he didn't read it, strikes me as quite interesting that he hates it:

Trump: IG report wrong, 'scum on top' at FBI

By Max Greenwood @ TheHill com, June 15

President Trump on Friday declared that the conclusion of a report by the Justice Department's internal watchdog was “wrong,” insisting that it showed that top FBI officials acted with political bias against him.

“The end result was wrong. I mean, there was total bias,” Trump said in an interview from the White House lawn with “Fox & Friends,” pointing to text messages from FBI official Peter Strzok disclosed in the report.

The report by the Justice Department's inspector general “was a horror show,” Trump said, and its conclusion “was ridiculous.” [.....]

The main findings of the

AmericanDreamer — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 14:18:46 +0000

In reply to The point I was trying to

edits to add: Corrected inadvertent insertion of one of my paragraphs at the end of the second quote from the OIG Executive Summary below, and adding the link to the OIG report itself, which is https://www.justice.gov/file/1071991/download

The main findings of the report were critical of a number of Comey's decisions on the HRC email investigation, and of pro-Clinton actions of some FBI employees.

On the former, from page x of the Executive Summary of the OIG report itself:

We found no evidence that Comey’s decision to send the October 28 letter was influenced by political preferences. Instead, we found that his decision was the result of several interrelated factors that were connected to his concern that failing to send the letter would harm the FBI and his ability to lead it, and his view that candidate Clinton was going to win the presidency and that she would be perceived to be an illegitimate president if the public first learned of the information after the election. Although Comey told us that he “didn’t make this decision because [he] thought it would leak otherwise,” several FBI officials told us that the concern about leaks played a role in the decision.

Much like with his July 5 announcement, we found that in making this decision, Comey engaged in ad hoc decisionmaking based on his personal views even if it meant rejecting longstanding Department policy or practice. We found unpersuasive Comey’s explanation as to why transparency was more important than Department policy and practice with regard to the reactivated Midyear investigation while, by contrast, Department policy and practice were more important to follow with regard to the Clinton Foundation and Russia investigations.

Comey’s description of his choice as being between “two doors,” one labeled “speak” and one labeled “conceal,” was a false dichotomy. The two doors were actually labeled “follow policy/practice” and “depart from policy/practice.” Although we acknowledge that Comey faced a difficult situation with unattractive choices, in proceeding as he did, we concluded that Comey made a serious error of judgment.

It's easy to get lost in the blizzard of information and developments that have been in the media.

The main outlines of this story seem to me to remain.

The conduct of the FBI as a whole overwhelmingly favored Trump during this past election:

*The HRC email investigation was in the media constantly, doing immense damage to Clinton

*The FBI knew about disconcerting and potentially nefarious contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians. This was not, ahem, in the media constantly in the run to election day 2016.

*Comey's announcement to re-open days before the election was highly unusual and was criticized heavily in the OIG report.

The fact that this report's finding that there were FBI employees who were pro-Clinton and acted inappropriately is being spun by pro-Trump forces as supporting the claims of a corrupt FBI engaged in a witch hunt against Trump is truly absurd. It holds no water whatsoever.

Page iii of the Executive Summary:

There were clearly tensions and disagreements in a number of important areas between Midyear agents and prosecutors. However, we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed in Chapter Five, or that the justifications offered for these decisions were pretextual.

Nonetheless, these messages cast a cloud over the FBI’s handling of the Midyear investigation and the investigation’s credibility. But our review did not find evidence to connect the political views expressed in these messages to the specific investigative decisions that we reviewed; rather, consistent with the analytic approach described above, we found that these specific decisions were the result of discretionary judgments made during the course of an investigation by the Midyear agents and prosecutors and that these judgment calls were not unreasonable.

Anyone who keeps foremost in mind what actually happened and did not happen, who it helped and who it damaged severely, could not make such a claim with a straight face.

So the Trump camp spin is just another example of part of its MO: Offer competing narratives and interpretations, however unjustified and absurd, to further confuse matters. Turn it into a she said/he said conflict where enough ordinary citizens conclude it is either far too confusing or unimportant or whatever to pay more attention to, or that both sides have their version and who is to say who is right, they're all acting in their self interest anyway, right?, and the Trump crowd gets the draw, or near draw, in public opinion, that they are seeking, to win or survive.

P.S. Checking just now, I

artappraiser — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 13:23:34 +0000

In reply to All I'm trying to get at is

P.S. Checking just now, I note that Carrie Johnson of NPR has a pretty ideal resume for doing just that.