It’s a concern that the ‘pandemic’ has moved everything having to do with the criminal activity of Obama, Brennan, Comey, et al, et al, et al off the news pages. We have not forgotten and dedicate this post to commentary regarding the latest report from Inspector General Horowitz.
The DOJ IG is a disgrace…and we’ve all breathlessly awaited his (whitewash) “call it like it is” report
As regards Former FBI Director “Big Jim” Comey’s a job performance appraisal doesn’t get much worse than this. It seems Big Jim’s self-serving “higher loyalty” should have been a devotion to ‘higher competency’.
But there are two things about the IG’s report for which we can all sit back and “allow things to move along since there really wasn’t all that much to see here:”
1) IG Horowitz, as is his won’t, failed to see, or at least made NO mention that there was any of that dreaded “political bias”, and,
2) Not to worry folks ! FBI Director Wray has it all under control. FBI personnel are being trained to ‘be accurate’, somewhat ‘competent, and, not that they ever were, ‘politically biased’.
Here are some excerpts from the Wall Street Journal’s story on the IG report which was released this week, along with some of our observations:
The IG released its report on the FBI’s FISA performance this week. It was as expected. Unavoidably critical but anxious to file it under “Move on; nothing much to see here”: “The report said investigators didn’t reach any conclusions on whether the errors were material to the applications themselves or would have influenced the court’s decisions to approve the applications.”
Huh!?
Well, we should not worry. FBI Director Chris Wray has everything under control (he’s training FBI personnel to be ‘accurate’, competent and not politically biased; Uh, gee, I wonder why nobody ever thought of that before!):
“FBI officials stressed the agency already was in the process of taking steps to improve its surveillance application process. The “findings underscore the importance of the more than 40 corrective actions that [FBI Director Chris] Wray ordered late last year,”
Missing but implicit (at least to our cynical eye) was the IG’s propensity to be unable to find any ‘political bias’. (The report said investigators didn’t reach any conclusions on whether the errors were material to the applications themselves or would have influenced the court’s decisions to approve the applications. The report did say the pattern “undermines the FBI’s ability to achieve its ‘scrupulously accurate’ standard for FISA applications.”)
More highlights from the WSJ ‘story’, “”FBI WIRETAP REQUESTS SHOW PERSISTENT FLAWS” (bold our emphasis):
“More than two dozen Federal Bureau of Investigation applications to monitor Americans suspected of having links to foreign intelligence or terrorism had errors in their files, a Justice Department watchdog said, representing 100% of the sampling of applications he examined.
“The results point to widespread problems at the FBI, including sloppy recordkeeping by case agents, and indicate the shortcomings aren’t limited to those previously found in the highly scrutinized requests to surveil for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
“The report said investigators found facts in all 25 applications that were either not supported, not clearly corroborated or inconsistent with documentation in factual-support files, though it didn’t look at the broader case file for such information. It said the review had found an average of 20 issues per application, with as many as 65 issues in one, and fewer than five in another.”
The results point to widespread problems at the FBI, including sloppy recordkeeping by case agents, and indicate the shortcomings aren’t limited to those previously found in the highly scrutinized requests to surveil for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
In a report released Tuesday, the Justice Department’s inspector general said he discovered “apparent errors or inadequately supported facts” in the files meant to provide factual support for the information cited in the 25 secret applications. Those requests sought wiretapping authority from a special court under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, a law that is the subject of pointed debate in Congress.
The findings follow a December report in which the watchdog found a series of errors in the FBI’s pursuit of a wiretap against Mr. Page, a former Trump foreign-policy adviser.
In four additional applications, the FBI couldn’t locate the files of factual support, the report said.
Applications were reviewed across eight FBI field offices that involved surveillance on Americans related to counterintelligence or counterterrorism investigations between October 2014 and September 2019, it said.
FBI officials stressed the agency already was in the process of taking steps to improve its surveillance application process. The “findings underscore the importance of the more than 40 corrective actions that [FBI Director Chris] Wray ordered late last year,” the FBI’s associate deputy director Paul Abbate wrote in response to the new report.
But some privacy advocates said the new findings vindicated their views that problems with FISA are systemic—rather than evidence of bias against President Trump and his campaign, as Mr. Trump has suggested—and far broader than the public knows due to a lack of rigorous independent oversight.
“If an application as sensitive as Page’s had serious problems, it was highly likely there were going to be issues elsewhere,” Jake Laperruque, senior counsel at Project on Government Oversight and a former Senate aide who worked on surveillance issues.
In particular, the review found that the FBI hadn’t adhered to a set of internal standards, known as the Woods Procedures, that were adopted in 2001 to better safeguard against FISA application abuses. Those procedures—designed to ensure the accuracy of facts represented in FISA applications—have long been cited by the FBI to answer concerns of potential privacy abuses in the secretive surveillance system that was established more than 40 years ago.
“We do not have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods Procedures in compliance with FBI policy,” the report said.
MAYBE ‘BIG JIM’ COMEY MIGHT WANT TO MAKE SOME REVISIONS TO HIS BOOK, “A HIGHER LOYALTY”.
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report “helps the FBI politically because it undercuts the narrative among President Trump and his supporters that the bureau cut corners to surveil the adviser, Carter Page, as part of a politically motivated conspiracy.”
NO POLITICAL BIAS HERE
DEEP ROT AT THE FBI (AND THE TIMES)
Eli Lake takes a look at the latest Department of Justice Inspector General report on the rot at the FBI in the Bloomberg column “The FBI Can’t Be Trusted With the Surveillance of Americans.” Subhead: “An inspector general report finds that the bureau has been systematically unscrupulous.” I posted a copy of Horowitz’s OIG “memorandum” hereyesterday.
It is not hard to believe how pervasive the rot at the FBI is, but the Horowitz memo should serve as a call to action and to the administration of justice in the matter of Donald Trump. However, that is not quite how it is being received. Lake writes, for example, that we have “a system that relies almost exclusively on the FBI being scrupulous with its facts. [Yet] Horowitz’s findings show that the bureau has been systematically unscrupulous.” Eli doesn’t call out the New York Times, but the Times is Exhibit A of what he calls “the twisted politics of the Trump era.” How twisted? This twisted:
In the twisted politics of the Trump Era, some of bureau’s defenders might actually view this report as good news: It shows that the investigation of the Trump campaign was not necessarily politically motivated. The bureau made the same kinds of mistakes with suspects who were not connected to the Trump campaign.
That’s hardly reassuring — and the malpractice that the report uncovers is a much larger problem than the FBI and its defenders may wish to admit. So far, the response to Horowitz’s December report has been a series of administrative reforms, such as a requirement that FBI field offices preserve their “Woods files” and a mandate for new FISA training for FBI lawyers and agents. That’s all well and good. But one need not go back to the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover to see that the bureau has been careless in its monitoring of U.S. citizens.
The Woods procedures were issued in 2001 after Congress obtained a memo from the FBI’s counterterrorism division detailing surveillance abuse in the late 1990s. One target’s cell phone remained tapped after he gave it up and the number was reassigned to a different person. Another FBI field office videotaped a meeting, despite a clear prohibition on that technique in its FISA warrant. In 2003, an interim report from the Senate Judiciary Committee concluded that the 2001 memo showed “the FBI was experiencing more systemic problems related to the implementation of FISA orders” than a problem with the surveillance law itself.
Very little has changed in the intervening 17 years. That’s why it’s foolish to expect new and better procedures will work this time. A better approach would be an aggressive policy to prosecute FBI agents and lawyers who submit falsehoods to the surveillance court. The best way to prevent future violations is to severely punish those who commit them in the present.
The New York Times is illustrative of “the twisted politics of the Trump era.” Daniel Chaitin covers the Times angle in his Examiner article “‘Biased and out of control’: Devin Nunes rips New York Times reporting on FISA memo.” Chaitin reports on Rep. Devin Nunes’s interview with Larry O’Connor:
Radio host Larry O’Connor read a passage from the [Times’s] report [on the Horowitz memo] to Nunes during the Examining Politics podcast on Tuesday. It said DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report “helps the FBI politically because it undercuts the narrative among President Trump and his supporters that the bureau cut corners to surveil the adviser, Carter Page, as part of a politically motivated conspiracy.”
“So, the good news for the FBI is that they trampled on people’s rights all over the place, not just people who worked with Donald Trump’s campaign,” O’Connor said. “Is that the takeaway we should have here congressman?”
You can hear Rep. Nunes’s response in the podcast of the interview segment below, preceded by Larry’s interview with Mark Cuban.
Quotable quote (Chaitin quoting the Times): “The finding of systemic incompetence is devastating for the FBI. But, in the Trump era, the discovery is leavened by an unusual side benefit for the bureau: It undercuts the narrative fostered by President Trump and his supporters that the botching of applications to surveil his campaign adviser Carter Page is evidence that the FBI engaged in a politically biased conspiracy.”
