The Inspector General’s Report Shows FBI Abused its Power

By Olivia Pierson
First published on Insight@theBFD 12/12/19

One of the most enlightened acts that President Trump ever committed early on in his presidency was to unceremoniously fire former FBI director, James Comey.
 
After examining a million documents and interviewing over 100 witnesses, the DOJ’s report into the surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016 and beyond, written by Inspector General Michael Horowitz, shows that everything Republicans feared about corruption in the top tier of the U.S intelligence community was all true. In the 476-page report, the Inspector General drew attention to 51 violations and 9 false statements made by the FBI.

The report proves that the FBI shamelessly abused the FISA process under Commissar Comey.

A FISA warrant, which is the most intrusive level of surveillance allowed under the law, was issued in order to spy on Carter Page, a low-level associate of Trump’s 2016 election campaign.

FISA warrants allow not only for the person to be surveilled but also all of his/her contacts and the contacts of those contacts – which means that the FBI could have been surveilling every single person who worked on Trump’s campaign, including Trump himself. The FISA warrant on Page was renewed three more times.  The first warrant heavily relied on the fake Christopher Steele dossier which was compiled from information given to Steele by a discredited Russian contact connected to the Kremlin. The FBI knew it to be highly questionable and not corroborated, but they used it anyway.

The FBI also knew that the dossier was a dirt-digging escapade, paid for by Hillary Clinton’s DNC as “opposition research.” This incredibly important piece of information was willfully omitted from the official FISA applications, one of seventeen “significant errors or omissions” highlighted in the Inspector General’s report – and those pertain to Page’s case alone.
 
Carter Page worked for the CIA for years – and that exculpatory fact was also left out of the FISA application, as well as being edited out of an email (doctored) by a top FBI lawyer – which is a criminal offence. Page, who was monitored for a year, was never charged for anything, which, considering that each FISA application requires new evidence to justify its approval, begs the question: on what basis were they continually issued, the last one given out in June 2017?

Three other people were also surveilled according to the Inspector General’s report: Paul Manafort, General Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos. 

Bizarrely, Commissar Comey took a sanctimonious victory lap all over Twitter and CNN today, obviously feeling vindicated despite the chronic surveillance abuses he sanctioned. He tweeted: 

“So it was all lies. No treason. No spying on the campaign. No tapping Trumps wires. It was just good people trying to protect America.” 

No spying on the campaign?  What the hell is Commissar Comey smoking? Spying and leaking were his favourite tools of trade. The “no spying” narrative is just pure fake news and how he says it with a straight face is beyond the conscience of ordinary folks. He has offered no apology to Carter Page but is demanding one from President Trump.

Inspector General Horowitz has concluded that “no bias” is in evidence as a motive for the FBI’s conduct, but Attorney General Bill Barr and U.S attorney John Durham vehemently disagree. Durham, who is conducting a criminal investigation into these events that has much wider reach and power than the Inspector General, has come out publicly in an unprecedented reproach of the report’s conclusions.  I wonder what he knows that Horowitz doesn’t?

Attorney General Barr issued a damning statement today contradicting Horowitz’s conclusions:

The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI 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.  It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory.  Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump’s administration.  In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source.  The Inspector General found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory.  While most of the misconduct identified by the Inspector General was committed in 2016 and 2017 by a small group of now-former FBI officials, the malfeasance and misfeasance detailed in the Inspector General’s report reflects a clear abuse of the FISA process.

Remember, the investigation that Durham is now pursuing is not just some journalistic account of what took place, it’s a criminal investigation into the origins of what became Robert Mueller’s expensive, two-year Special Counsel investigation of the Trump/Russia collusion hoax, which yielded nothing on the president but had Flynn, Manafort and Stone convicted.

And so we find ourselves again waiting for some more detailed truth concerning Deep State corruption. The Inspector General just provided plenty for the FBI to be both nervous and ashamed about, despite Commissar Comey’s premature victory lap. Nobody seems to know what exactly to make of Horowitz, but given that he was President Obama’s Democrat appointee, he may be trying to protect the legacy of his former boss, since these stunning abuses of power happened under Obama’s administration and most likely with his permission. 

Then again, the report’s information that Horowitz just provided to the American public is overwhelmingly condemning of the FBI - who roundly mocked then President-elect Trump when he claimed three years ago that his campaign had been wire-tapped and spied upon.  We now know this to be a fact.

We are still not at the bottom of this swampy cesspool, but I get the feeling that soon we’re going to be.

Edit: today, one week after this article was written, a FISA court judge, one Rosemary Collyer, has ripped the FBI, saying: “your deceptive behavior calls into question all the warrants against Carter Page."
 
If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"
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