This is not a "debunked conspiracy theory." It is not "Russian misinformation." It is not a bunch of lies propagated by the White House to save Donald Trump from impeachment. It is not the manufactured Fake News based on information obtained by a "source close to the matter."(*)
No, this is the conclusion reached by Inspector General Michael Horowitz and it is reported by Rowan Scarborough, investigative reporter for the Washington Times.
The report discloses that the FBI dispatched against Trump allies multiple unnamed FBI informants known as confidential human sources (CHS). The most publicized was Stefan Halper, a longtime Washington national security figure and Cambridge University professor. He ingratiated himself to George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, while also attempting to engage with a senior Trump campaign official in New York.Our once-honest news media is very busy trying to convince you that Horowitz didn't find evidence of political bias in the launch or continuation of Crossfire Hurricane, the clandestine investigation of the Trump campaign's alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 election. Despite the fact that Horowitz noted at least 17 errors or glowing omissions of evidence during the investigation, the media would have you believe that all 17 incidents of oopsie went in favor of the FBI and went against a finding of innocence is... well... just bad luck.
Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz’s Dec. 9 report says that rather than hearing incriminating statements, Mr. Halper (whom he did not identify) recorded conversations that could be seen as exculpatory.
Mr. Horowitz rapped the FBI for not including them in four sworn affidavits agents presented to federal judges to authorize Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) electronic and physical spying on Mr. Page. ...
Mr. Horowitz listed that FBI decision as one of 17 glaring omissions or inaccuracies that misled the FISA judges who signed four surveillance warrants on Mr. Page.
“None of these inaccuracies and omissions were brought to the attention of OI before the last FISA application was filed in June 2017,” the IG said. “Consequently, these failures were repeated in all three renewal applications.”
A coin flip coming up tails twice is bad luck. A coin flip going against you 17 straight times has odds of 131,072 to 1.
Paul Sperry at RealClearPolitics.com notes that Horowitz has a well-developed pattern of pulling knockout punches. He's a good bureaucrat and just does what bureaucrats do. But even a history like that can't explain what has happened here.
On October 1, 2019, this blog told you that the current push to impeach the President of the United States is intended to deflect attention away from the Horowitz report. That blog post came more than two months before the Horowitz report was even published on December 9, 2019. I wrote about it again here, and then again right here.
Scarborough's report also confirms what we already knew about where the Horowitz findings are going.
Attorney General William Barr says the FBI started the investigation on flimsy grounds. He has tapped John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to conduct an inquiry into the origins of Crossfire Hurricane.... Mr. Durham has been looking into Mr. Mifsud and, according to a defense attorney court filing in a criminal case, his office took possession of two cellphones used by the Maltese professor.
Mr. Mifsud is a shadowy figure mentioned throughout the Mueller report. Papadopoulos writes that he believes Mifsud is/was a western intelligence operative; CIA, DIA or FBI CounterIntel. Whoever he is, court records show that Durham has physical evidence on his involvement and was willing to go to Europe to get it.
Read this though, from someone with a very different perspective on President Trump:
Imagine if a similar situation had taken place in January of 2009, involving president-elect Barack Obama. Picture a meeting between Obama and the heads of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, along with the DIA, in which the newly-elected president is presented with a report complied by, say, Judicial Watch, accusing him of links to al-Qaeda. Imagine further that they tell Obama they are presenting him with this information to make him aware of a blackmail threat, and to reassure him they won’t give news agencies a “hook” to publish the news.That's from Matt Taibbi, a senior editor at left wing icon Rolling Stone, writing at his independent site on Substack.com. His is one of the honest liberal voices that people should be listening to instead of parroting the formerly honest mainstream news media. Taibbi et al are very smart people and they are not conservatives.
Now imagine if that news came out on Fox days later. Imagine further that within a year, one of the four officials became a paid Fox contributor. Democrats would lose their minds in this set of circumstances.
The country mostly did not lose its mind, however, because the episode did not involve a traditionally presidential figure like Obama, nor was it understood to have been directed at the institution of “the White House” in the abstract.
Instead, it was a story about an infamously corrupt individual, Donald Trump, a pussy-grabbing scammer who bragged about using bankruptcy to escape debt and publicly praised Vladimir Putin. Audiences believed the allegations against this person and saw the intelligence/counterintelligence community as acting patriotically, doing their best to keep us informed about a still-breaking investigation of a rogue president.
There were FBI spies inside the Trump campaign. They lied to federal judges to gain access to Trump campaign officials. They repeated those lies in sworn statements even after they knew the truth. They manufactured and altered evidence. And their actions were sanctioned at the highest levels of the Department of Justice.
Anyone who believes Barack Obama didn't know what was happening is a fool.
