The Horowitz report is simply the endnote to three years of rank criminality that have led to the firings, retirements, reassignments, and demotions of most of the FBI’s top Washington echelon: James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, William Priestap, James Rybicki, James Baker, along with Josh Campbell, James Turgal, Greg Bower, Michael Steinbach, John Giacalone, and Kevin Clinesmith. Comey, McCabe, and Clinesmith were criminally referred to the Justice Department by various inspector general reports, respectively for leaking, deceiving federal investigators, and altering a document presented to a FISA court.
Page and Strzok were both fired from the Mueller investigation. Their texts—including, one assumes, an entire corpus of exchanges that remains missing and was apparently destroyed by FBI employees—are a repository of conflicts of interest, unprofessionalism, and unadulterated hatred of Trump and his supporters. Clinesmith, who likely committed a felony by doctoring an email submitted to a FISA court, openly cheered on “le (sic) resistance.”
But we’re told that Trump is the threat to the sanctity of our institutions. Related:
Some copy-editor at the New York Times has a sense of humor.
“The president and his allies have turned investigations into a political tool for use against their enemies,” reads the headline over a “news analysis” by James B. Stewart.
Well.
The Democrats began publicly laying the foundation for impeaching Donald Trump before he was sworn in as president, the FBI under the Obama administration used counterintelligence powers to investigate the rival party’s presidential campaign and falsified evidence to get permission to continue the investigation, etc., but when Trump et al. point out that the inspector general has found serious misconduct on the part of the FBI, it’s “The president and his allies have turned investigations into a political tool to use against their enemies.” It’s the new “Republicans Pounce!” headline.
I do not think that you would need to be an admirer of President Trump or a partisan Republican (I am neither) to understand, as all mentally normal people do, that the impeachment itself is the trophy example of a weaponized investigation being used for political purposes.
Indeed. Plus:
In the now-forgotten days of October 2016, the great rhetorical demand among Democrats was that Donald Trump and Republicans promise that they would “accept the results of the election.” This was always a little mystifying, inasmuch as it raised the question of what they might do instead — raise an army? But that rhetoric was premised on the assumption that the Republican candidate was going to lose in 2016. Since then, it has been Democrats who have steadfastly refused to accept the results of the 2016 election.
And it’s been very damaging to the country and the Constitution.