95 On Rogue FBI Agent Collusion, Michael Horowitz does a Bill Barr
UPDATE 2.0: Overall this chapter is pretty much perfectly on point. The only thing I still can’t decide is wether the long quote at the end of the summary is necessary or redundant.
UPDATE: This point is also important-add it if it hasn’t already been made in this chapter
EW’s point-that Horowitz may know the truth about the motivation of the leakers perhaps goes better following the IG passage.
UPDATE: Did I put it in the chapter?
UPDATE: Overall this chapter also seems to be on point substantively. Perhaps a little extra color could be added on the fact the IG made no attempt to get the internet providers or the substance of the calls-sounds an awful lot like the FBI’s fake investigation of Kavanaugh.
UPDATE: Place below
https://mobile.twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1323264229349216259
I have to admit I disagree with Emptywheel here.
UPDATE: In Chapter IG Compromised I’d asked the question if the IG Emailgate investigation had been compromised. We can now state conclusively yes it was.
This is why as much as I hate disagree with EW I do have to disagree with her on this tweet and now it’s even clearer that Horowitz would be exactly the wrong person to lead any such investigation.
In Chapter Adam Schiff I discussed the media environment prior to Barr’s very dishonest-but very (politically)successful-“summary” of the Mueller Report. It was very dishonest and unnecessary as Mueller himself had a summary-at a minimum that’s the summary Barr should have released at the end of March, 2019.
But seeing as the lies Barr told that day quickly ossified into what remains the MSM narrative to this day-that Mueller proved NO COLLUSION and that the most notably wrong thing done in 2016 was the compilation of the Steele Dossier a la Erik Wemple-it has to be admitted that it was wildly successful.
One of the biggest MSM obsessions since the earliest days of the Mueller investigation was when it would end-the-factually based-story of Russian interference and collusion in the 2016 election was never a narrative the savvy pundits cared for-unlike HER EMAILS or Whitewater. In the first three months of 2019 the obsession with the end of the investigation skyrocketed-sure they’d be proven accurate this time-if you predict a blizzard every single day eventually you’ll be right.
A new focus in January-March 2019 prior to the release of Barr’s lying letter and finally the actual, redacted report- was that Barr was under absolutely no obligation to release any report at all. Presumably this meant we had to be grateful for whatever Barr-who was obviously extremely biased in favor of Trump-chose to dole out. As I argued in Chapter Adam Schiff I never got the need for these stories-why did it need to be THE main narrative? To make sure Barr knew he had carte blanche? Of course, he probably knew this but just in case why help him? It’s like reporting on the many ways the Holocaust could have been done even more efficiently.
Of course, Barr realized he couldn’t get away politically with simply releasing nothing-as a number of savvy pundits seemed to be practically encouraging. But he was still very successful by frontrunning the report with a phony summary. How successful was clear in the interview Schiff had with Chris Cuomo the following day-as we see in Chapter Schiff. Cuomo dismissed the idea that there could possibly be anything new in the actual Mueller Report that would change the Barr Narrative in any meaningful way-Cuomo decreed that it was impossible to believe Barr could have lied in the summary.
UPDATE: Comey also fell for it hook, line, and sinker-he criticized Hillary’s judgment? Repeatedly, over and over we’ve seen that no one’s judgment is worse than Mr. 500 Year Flood.
After the fact Comey explained Barr’s lies by declaring Barr had been corrupted.
James Comey: How Trump Co-opts Leaders Like Bill Barr
“Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive this president.”
This was actually a very popular, savvy, “institutionalist” view-and quite mistaken. Barr hadn’t been corrupted-he was always like this. Comey’s rap about lacking inner strength and making compromises misses the point regarding a Bill Barr. The stuff he did for Trump weren’t “compromises”-he’d done the same for George H.W. Bush.
FN: See chapter Barr-Durham Fiasco
Barr wasn’t a savvy “instituionalist” driven by timidity and careerism, rather he was a partisan Republican hack who never compromised on his reactionary Far Right agenda.
Indeed, you can argue Comey had the same problem-if he’d “compromised” he would have followed DOJ policy and not interfered and elected Trump.
FN: As I explain in chapter Why the Comey Letter, Comey was an interesting hybrid-he was part “institituionalist” but his version was very self righteous and sanctimonious-and part a GOP partisan hack.
End UPDATE
It would later be admitted how much he had in fact lied but as is typical of cultish reasoning while this would be acknowledged it never made any dent in the false narrative of NO COLLUSION.
So Barr wouldn’t take the savvy advice and release nothing but did pretty well with his dishonest summary that nevertheless set in stone the media narrative on all things Russian Collusion.
FN: See Chapter Katy Kay
But someone did take the savvy advice: Michael Horowitz. He released a thin summary that basically amounted to: because there were so many leaks we can’t isolate any individual leaks, ie everyone did it so no one is accountable. Turns out everybody else is doing it can be a successful legal argument.
“FBI policies strictly limit the employees who are authorized to speak to the media, and require all other employees to coordinate with or obtain approval from the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA) in connection with such communications. (See, e.g., Section 2.4 of the Public Affairs Manual and Section 3.1 of the Media Relations at FBI Headquarters and in Field Offices Policy Guide).
“Nonetheless, as described in our 2016 pre-election report, we found that these policies appeared to be widely ignored during the period we reviewed. Specifically, in our analysis of FBI telephone records, FBI email records, FBI text, and Microsoft Lync instant messages, we identified numerous FBI employees, at all levels of the organization and with no official reason to be in contact with the media, who were nevertheless in frequent contact with reporters.”
The fact that everyone was leaking somehow didn’t save Andy McCabe.
It was always obvious-obvious to me at least-that Horowitz would never release this report while Trump was “President.” But as it would happen Horrowitz waited until Biden was President to reveal he will never release it. Which is itself similarly predictable.
FN: It was predictable that it would never see the light of day with Trump having stolen the WH but it was also fairly predictable that Horowitz would wait till Trump left to announce it will never see the light of day. Again this was an investigation of the FBI which they call Trumpland not for nothing. So you could have made some real money betting that it would never be allowed to see the light of day but they’d have to wait for Trump to leave to table it for good.
End FN
But looking back Horowitz telegraphed where this was going-and more precisely wasn’t going- three and a half years ago.
Horowitz repeats again that they did not look at NY agents for bias.
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) June 19, 2018
If they didn’t look for bias-unlike with Strozk-Page-small surprise they didn’t find it, but as they didn’t it’s clear this investigation was never going to find much. Devlin Barrett of course declared victory after the release of this report summary. But it’s pretty hard to find bias among Barrett’s friends over at NYFBI if they didn’t look. If you do look, of course, it’s not hard to find at all.
FN: See Chapter Devlin Barrett and Devin Nunes for more.
UPDATE: Does this part starting with EW’s tweet belong below?
Meanwhile the MSM gives us yet another bad take this time on Horowitz’s slender summary.
I mean there MUST be a savvy textbook somewhere with the master key of stock bad takes for any occasion because once again they settled on the absolutely worst take and as so often is the case it all begins with the title:
FN: Indeed this is a point made about the post Comey freakout from Dean Baquet and Friends in 2016. Many pundits complained that when you actually read the articles they weren’t as bad as the headlines suggested-this was a specific point that the Associated Press editor again and again had failed to get-the headline is the only thing the largest percentage of people will ever see. The headline is where a great deal of the mischief is done.
“Justice Department IG couldn’t find evidence of FBI Clinton probe leaks to Giuliani.”
I mean these savvy press coverage at this point is a parody of itself. NO CLEAR LINK TO RUSSIA NO COLLUSION NO OBSTRUCTION TOTAL EXONERATION and now a new one added to the pantheon: NO EVIDENCE OF LEAKS
Again as noted above, Horowitz was playing the Bill Barr playbook in going with a summary except Horowitz went Barr one better by never releasing the report. Indeed a closer examination of this summary reveals that most of it was a cut and paste job off what they put out in part one of the report released in June 2018-the only part ever released as it turned out.
But Horowitz channeled Bill Barr in another way too-his misleading summary misled the MSM to the extent that they flooded the zone with more savvy shit-or at least shitty headlines. Just as the Mueller Report did NOT come close to proving there was no collusion as meager as Horowitz’s summary was it did not claim there was no evidence. Again we can quibble all day about what this headline was supposed to mean but it’s clear that most readers will interpret it to mean that rogue FBI agents didn’t leak to Giuliani after all-when that’s not at all what the summary says.
“According to the new report, Giuliani, in his interview with the inspector general, denied receiving directly or indirectly information about the Clinton investigation. He told the inspector general he had not been in contact with any active FBI agents that month, claiming that his use of “active” in those 2016 public comments referred to retired agents still doing security.”
You mean Giuliani denied this? Well I guess that’s it then, I admit I didn’t see that coming. One thing guilty people never do is make false denials so case closed.
Regarding this quibble over what he meant by his own use of the words ‘active agents’ at the time, as we have noted in other chapters many powerful retired agents stayed on just to hunt for Hillary’s emails anyway so it’s all about making distinctions with much less difference than one would naively assume.
Below we are going to reread a piece Marcy Wheeler wrote back in June 2018 that in retrospect reveals a lot-based on this Horowitz’s Barr play is not at all surprising-he clearly telegraphed where this was going three and a half years ago.
“The four FBI employees meanwhile also denied being in contact with Giuliani. When the inspector general further reviewed information from their FBI phones, the office found that those agents had been in contact with numbers that were not “specific to Giuliani.”
“Accordingly, the purported investigative leads provided by the FBI based on alleged FBI employee contacts with Giuliani were inaccurate,” the inspector general report said.
These are such parsed, ambiguous sentences-what exactly does “not specific to Giuliani” mean? It could mean many things. From such pedantic quibbles they then switch to a strong, categorical statement that the leads were “inaccurate”-which part exactly? Because not specific to Giuliani could mean almost anything-but clearly the assumption you’re supposed to make is that they didn’t call Giuliani after all-but that is far from clear.
But my guess is the precise meaning is closer to they called Rudy but an a phone that technically isn’t his phone. It’s like I call you on the phone but later say I didn’t call you I called your office and happened to talk to you. That’s likely a lot closer to what the actual meaning is.
Meanwhile who are these “four FBI employees?” Why are they receiving the privilege of anonymity not allowed to Peter Strozk and Lisa Page? Once again we see the asymmetrical way that Trumpland the FBI treats investigations that the Republican party demands and those it doesn’t want. After all, the basic premise of Horowitz’s meager summary is that there were so many leaks none can be “isolated.” Basically no one could be targeted as everyone was doing it and as you can’t target you have to target no one.
But this upside down logic wasn’t used with Andy McCabe. Similarly Strozk and Page had their names made public and their lives will likely never be the same again but they had committed the sin of being anti Trump in their personal preferences. In one of Horowitz’s later GOP demanded reports-it was revealed that there were many anti Clinton texts but these were never publicized.
These “four FBI employees” here get double protection we get nothing on either their identity or the subject matter of their communications with Giuliani. And that shouldn’t be-the public deserves this information as it was these rogue agents who flipped a democratic election.
But again, Emptywheel had written about Horowitz back in June 2018 and in retrospect this 2021 fiasco was already telegraphed three years ago
UPDATE: Cut this last half sentence and paste tweet below?
-as we saw in her tweet above, since they never looked for bias, they were never going to find it.
“As you likely know, I’m a big fan of Michael Horowitz. I think he has routinely discovered key aspects of DOJ and FBI’s behavior that needs improvement. I think he has stood up to FBI pushback reasonably well, if not always successfully. That other professional IGs look to him as their leader reflects the great respect he has earned among his peers.”
Marcy wrote this June, 2018. At the time no doubt even I-as cynical as I am of all people sort of-if didn’t exactly believe it, I tried not to disbelieve it. I tried to quiet my misgivings.
FN: Basically I trust no one in the Republican party, few in the MSM, ,and few in any way affiliated with the -Republican-Deep State starting with the FBI and I have yet to be led astray for being too cynical.
I was hoping for the best. But while I hold Ms. Wheeler’s opinion in high esteem I’d be lying if I claimed to be able to think of anything Horowitz has done for which I’m any kind of a fan. Looking back at the time I was (very cautiously) optimistic that Horowitz would come through with the truth about what happened over at the FBI in 2016-you know during the time they elected Trump.
But the long lag in time by then had already given me a gnawing suspicion-and it would turn out only too well founded. Again no matter how cynical I get about the Republican party, Nietzsche’s herd animals in the savvy mainstream press, and the FBI-I also have little faith in the Democratic “instituitonalists” that lead my own party-I’m never led astray. I never look back and say “You know I missed what was really happening because I was too cynical.”
No the only time is the rare times I allow myself to buy into savvy canards. Again I have a very high opinion of Marcy Wheeler but before Barr’s fake exoneration letter even she had expressed some optimism that Barr would play things straight-she had been-wrongly as it would turn out-persuaded by some of her media contacts in the DOJ, etc.
After seeing that I tried to feel a little more optimistic. But, alas, my own instinct was proven correct-that Bill Barr was no “institutionalist” he was a vigilant partisan GOP hack-what mattered in my mind was not his resume at the top of elite legal circles but the work he’d done for George Bush Sr-starting with the pardoning of Casper Weinberger, etc.
It was clear that if he’d simply done for Trump what he did for George Bush Sr, Trump would have every reason to be euphoric.
What we would see with Horowitz is that GOP parallel narrative after GOP parallel narrative got flagged down, investigated, with the report’s timely release, while the report on the rogue FBI agents kept getting delayed. In my heart I never believed that report would see the light of day as long as “President Trump” was infecting our WH
But it was after Biden finally got in-and what a struggle even getting him in the building was!-that Horowitz revealed he would never release the report on the leaks of the rogue anti Clinton agents.
Emptywheel seems to have revised her opinion somewhat.
Yet despite her subsequent admission he was part of the problem she still trusted him to get first crack at a possible future DOJ investigation. As I noted at the top of this chapter, this I can’t agree with.
Speaking specifically of Horowitz in evaluating his performance-going back to 2015-see Chapter No Probable Cause-it’s hard to think of many things-if anything-he’s done that have NOT been to the benefit of the Republican party. Again like Nance says coincidences take a lot of planning.
FN: It was Horowitz who initially gave the NYT the misimpression that Hillary was under criminal investigation.
In any case at the time EW did also express some concerns about the rogue FBI agent investigation.
“I’ve already mentioned, in passing, that I think Horowitz’ treatment of the NY field office leaks in the IG Report on the Hillary investigation to be really problematic. The report, and the Andrew McCabe report before it, makes it very clear the rampant leaking from NY motivated a lot of the defensive behavior at FBI and DOJ (not to mention the decision to take an overt act in advance of the election in violation of standing policy).
Ms. Wheeler than quotes copiously from the same passage I looked at in Chapter Why the Comey Letter-where Comey discussed with Loretta Lynch the extent of the Hillary Derangement Syndrome at NY FBI.
“Among other passages, the report cites this very long response (it starts on report page 385 if you want to read the whole thing) from Loretta Lynch, describing how much hatred towards Hillary there was in NY.”
FN: We won’t quote it here as it’s in the chapter Why the Comey Letter.
“The report makes clear that the NY leaks played a key role in Comey’s disastrous decision to announce the reopening of the investigation into Hillary. In spite of the magnitude that these leaks had, Horowitz did not seize the FBI phones of the presumed leakers to find out what kind of damning texts they sent among themselves. This is a point made by NYCSouthpaw in a thread the day the report came out. The asymmetric focus on bias against Trump and not against Hillary is a real problem with this report.”
The Horowitz summary justified this speciously by pointing out it wasn’t a criminal investigation.
I mean as it turned out despite all Comey’s faux “queasiness” over “matter not investigation” Emailgate itself wasn’t a criminal investigation-yet imagine if the FBI had done this with Hillary? It’s a great thought experiment as it would never have happened but if it did we’d still be hearing about it now. Because what use is any kind of investigation-criminal or otherwise-if you make no effort to verify facts beyond what witnesses who are under suspicion “remember?”
UPDATE: Does this long quote from the summary belong here or above with the first quotes?
“Since issuing the 2016 pre-election report, the OIG has conducted substantial additional
investigative work concerning these allegations and, consistent with the IG Act, publicly disclosed findings of misconduct related to three individual investigations involving then senior FBI officials.”
“First, on October 16, 2018, the OIG released a summary of findings of misconduct by an FBI Official for Accepting Gifts From Members of the Media and for Lack of Candor. Second, on May 29, 2019, the OIG released a summary of findings of misconduct by an FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Unauthorized Contacts with the Media, Disclosing Law Enforcement and Other Sensitive Information to the Media, and Accepting a Gift from the Media.”
“And, third, July 20, 2021, the OIG released a summary of misconduct by a former senior FBI official who had numerous unauthorized contacts with members of the media between January and November 2016, which included unauthorized social engagements involving drinks, lunches, and dinners in violation of FBI policy.”
“In addition, during the OIG’s broader investigation into unauthorized disclosures, the OIG
determined that dozens of other FBI employees had contact with certain members of the news media who had reported on non-public information about ongoing criminal investigations during the relevant time periods in 2016. We determined this information from reviewing FBI records and through forensic examination of FBI electronic devices, as described below.”
“A limited number of those FBI records, such as text messages, revealed the substance of those communications, most often when the employee involved was assigned to a public affairs role and the content reflected an official exchange.”
“However, most of those FBI records—such as telephone logs—did not reflect the substance of the communication, but only the fact of the contact between the two telephone numbers. Because this was a non-criminal administrative misconduct review, there was no legal basis to seek a court order to compel Internet service providers to produce to the OIG the content of any personal email communications for these FBI employees.”
“Additionally, consistent with OIG practice, the OIG did not seek to compel reporters, or the reporters’ telephone or Internet service providers, to produce call or email logs or other records.2 For the reasons provided below, the OIG is referring six of these employees to the FBI for it to determine whether their media contacts warrant disciplinary or other corrective action.”
Pp 2-3
Once again note that unlike with Strozk-Page Horowitz takes pains to protect the anonymity of these six FBI employees-he withholds not only their personal identities but also the substance of their concerning communications.
But at the end of the day how can you say there was no criminal conduct as you didn’t look? As for it not being a criminal investigation-neither was the Hillary Clinton investigation-see Chapter No Probable Cause-sounds an awful lot like the FBI’s fake investigation of Kavanaugh.
UPDATE:
https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/21-096.pdf
UPDATE 2.0:
I’d be very interested to know how much correlation there is between Jim Jordan’s fake “whistleblowers” and the 2016 leakers whose identities Horowitz has apparently vowed to defend forever.
UPDATE 3.0