House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes appears on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo to discuss the particulars of the IG report and the upcoming week.

Bartiromo is one of the few pundits who has actually absorbed the entire landscape of the back-story, read the actual reports and invested her time into the details.  As such Ms. Bartiromo is able to take a comprehensive understanding forward into her interviews:

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When we see that justice is measured, not by due process, but by compulsion; when we see that in order to invoke our fourth or sixth amendment right to privacy and due process, we need to obtain permission from men who rebuke the constitution; when we see that justice is determined by those who leverage, not in law, but in politics; when we see that men get power over individual liberty by graft and by scheme, and our representatives don’t protect us against them, but protect them against us; when we see corruption holding influence and individual liberty so easily dispatched and nullified; we may well know that our freedom is soon to perish.

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General David Petraeus was arrested for leaving his classified schedule on mistress Paula Broadwell’s nightstand.  Kristian Saucier was arrested for taking a classified photograph on a submarine.  Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin had dozens of classified Clinton emails on a laptop and…

There is a great deal of inconsistent application of law surrounding classified information. There is also a great deal of fatigue surrounding discussion of those inconsistent applications.  Contradictions, inconsistency and obtuse justifications are as rampant in our midst as the political narratives shaping them.  Perhaps that’s by design.

We begin reading Chapter 11 of the IG Report with a growing acceptance that not only is there a need for a special counsel, but there is a brutally obvious need for multiple special counsels; each given a specific carve-out investigation that comes directly from the content of the Inspector General report.   This issue of the handling of the Weiner/Abedin laptop screams for a special counsel investigation on that facet alone.  Why?

Well, consider this from page #388 (emphasis mine):

Midyear agents obtained a copy of the Weiner laptop from NYO immediately after the search warrant was signed on October 30.

The laptop was taken directly to Quantico where the FBI’s Operational Technology Division (OTD) began processing the laptop. The Lead Analyst told us that given the volume of emails on the laptop and the difficulty with de-duplicating the emails that “at least for the first few days, the scale of what we’re doing seem[ed] really, really big.”

Strzok told us that OTD was able “to do some amazing things” to “rapidly de-duplicate” the emails on the laptop, which significantly lowered the number of emails that the Midyear team would have to individually review. Strzok stated that only after that technological breakthrough did he begin to think it was “possible we might wrap up before the election.”  (pg 388)

The key takeaway here is two-fold.  First, the laptop is in the custody of the FBI; that’s important moving forward (I’ll explain later).  Also, specifically important, FBI Agent Peter Strzok, the lead investigative authority in the Hillary Clinton MYE (Mid-Year-Exam), is explaining to the IG how they were able to process an exhaustive volume of emails (350,000) and Blackberry communications (344,000) in a few days; [Oct 30 to Nov 5]

Note: “OTD was able “to do some amazing things to rapidly de-duplicate” the emails on the laptop.”

OK, you got that?

Now lets look at the very next page, #389 (again, emphasis mine):

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Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) appears on Fox News to discuss the IG report and the upcoming appearance of Michael Horowitz to the Judiciary and Oversight committee coming this Tuesday June 19th.

On Monday June 18th both Horowitz and FBI Director Chris Wray will be appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee (Chairman Grassley).  Then on Tuesday Horowitz will appear before the House Joint Judiciary/Oversight Committee.

We need Jim Jordan to ask some basic questions [SEE HERE] and gain clarity from Horowitz.  Tuesday is likely the best hope for answers because we have Jim Jordan, John Ratcliffe, Ron DeSantis, Louie Gohmert, Andy Biggs, Matt Gaetz, Steve King, possibly Mark Meadows and Chairman Goodlatte asking the questions:

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One of the interesting aspects of the IG report is the documented use of personal email by participants within the FBI “small group” Mid-Year-Exam (MYE) team. [pg 424]

One of those documented examples involves FBI Agent Peter Strzok downloading the content of the sealed Anthony Weiner Indictment, October 29, 2016, to his personal email address. Unauthorized extraction of a ‘sealed SDNY indictment‘, and transmission to a non-secure system, is a felony.

(From summary pg vii) We found that Strzok used his personal email accounts for official government business on several occasions, including forwarding an email from his FBI account to his personal email account about the proposed search warrant the Midyear team was seeking on the Weiner laptop.

==> This email included a draft of the search warrant affidavit, which contained information from the Weiner investigation that appears to have been under seal at the time in the Southern District of New York and information obtained pursuant to a grand jury subpoena issued in the Eastern District of Virginia in the Midyear investigation. <==

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Representatives Matt Gaetz and Ron DeSantis appear on Fox News to discuss the DOJ inspector general report after release:

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Regardless of what anyone might think about Paul Manafort individually, the fact that a federal judge is willing to put a white-collar defendant behind bars until trial  is absurd.  Paul Manafort has been charged with tax avoidance and financial crimes stemming from 2006 and 2009. [Detention order pdf below]  Manafort is accused of contacting a possible witness in the case; however, the prosecution refuses to tell Manafort who the witnesses or victims are.  His defense argues that it’s impossible to avoid contact with witnesses when the prosecution won’t tell the court who the witnesses are. So the judge throws him in jail.

Mueller is a rogue agent willing to tear down the constructs of the justice system in order to defend the inherent corruption within his beloved institutions.  Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said today it was “obnoxious to our Constitution” to put former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort behind bars prior to a trial.

“He has never been convicted of anything. He is as innocent as you and I,” Dershowitz said in an interview on MSNBC on Friday. “And the idea of locking somebody up before a trial is so obnoxious to our Constitution that every civil libertarian should be up in arms. What they can do if they think that he’s tampering with witnesses is: They can subject him to home arrest, take away his computer … they can have all kinds of restrictions, but the idea of putting somebody in jail before they’ve been convicted is an enactment of civil liberties.”

Dershowitz comments come after Manafort was taken to a federal jail on Friday after U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson revoked his current bail that permitted him out on house arrest and after he pleaded not guilty to charges of obstruction. He will stay at the federal jail until his trial in September. (read more)

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One of the information issues with the IG report is that it’s written entirely from an insider’s perspective.  Therefore without an understanding of how divisions within Main Justice related to the discussed activity within FBI main DC offices it can be very confusing to understand.

The ‘insider narration’ makes it difficult to see what happened with the Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner laptop; and how the Clinton emails were discovered.  However, because the issue is so important the IG report spends three chapters on this time-frame between September 28th and October 29th, 2016; and ultimately the next day, Oct. 30th, when a search warrant was executed for the laptop content.

IG Horowitz takes this aspect of the investigation into granularity and nuance (Chapters 8, 9 and 10).

At the heart of the activity during this critical period is FBI lawyer #1 Tashina “Tash” Gauhar who was on a video conference call with the FBI New York Field Office (NYFO) as the discoveries of hundreds of thousands of Clinton emails were relayed internally to the Mid-Year-Event (MYE) team in DC on September 29th, 2016.

Almost a full month went by until October 27th, 2016, when the MYE team all gathered with James Comey to talk about the laptop issues and the emails.   Within the IG review of this period, there is a bunch of ass-covering documentation that takes place in hindsight to the events.  The IG is careful to point out each time his investigation is presented with documentary evidence that was clearly written long-after the events being questioned.

The central IG question is: why didn’t the FBI take immediate action to review 725,000 Clinton-centric emails on the Huma/Weiner laptop?  Why did they wait a month before seeking a search warrant?  Why were they doing nothing?

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On Page Xii of the IG report the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (DOJ-OIG) highlights numerous FBI officials who accepted bribes from multiple media outlets including: “tickets to sporting events”, “golf outings”, “drinks and meals” as well as exclusive invitations and admission to “nonpublic social events”.

The OIG investigative finding was disturbing enough to launch a separate set of investigations that will be included in follow-up reports.

IG REPORT – 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. Attached to this report as Attachments E and F are two link charts that reflect the volume of communications that we identified between FBI employees and media representatives in April/May and October 2016. We have profound concerns about the volume and extent of unauthorized media contacts by FBI personnel that we have uncovered during our review.

In addition, we identified instances where FBI employees improperly received benefits from reporters, including tickets to sporting events, golfing outings, drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social events. We will separately report on those investigations as they are concluded, consistent with the Inspector General Act, other applicable federal statutes, and OIG policy.

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The 18-month Inspector General review of the DOJ/FBI investigation of the Hillary Clinton email has been released – OIG RELEASE LINK HERE

This IG inquiry is specifically looking into whether the FBI investigation was corrupted by political influence in their determination of the Clinton outcome. The IG report provides background on the overall issues, the potential crimes; the subsequent coverup; and the corruption that infested the 2016 Department of Justice and the FBI.

Here’s The Report:

[scribd id=381806566 key=key-4WfKaOih0Xm7EA7gdK93 mode=scroll]

(pdf link)

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Don’t Comment Unless You’ve Read The Full Report

Important note.  Read, but don’t focus on, the “executive summary” or “conclusions”; those two sections were written by political administrators in FBI and DOJ leadership.  Focus on the substance of the documented facts within the IG report.  You’ll note the specific facts don’t support the “summary/conclusion”.

Analysis will follow.

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The Potomac Two-Step

♦ Statement from Trey Gowdy. [SEE HERE] Given the nature and construct of the statement it was obviously written before today and timed for a release at a specific time of day today. Reeks of familiar UniParty swamp defense. Chaff and Countermeasures.

WASHINGTON, DC – House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy released the following statement after the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a report on FBI and DOJ actions in advance of the 2016 election.

“I am alarmed, angered, and deeply disappointed by the Inspector General’s finding of numerous failures by DOJ and FBI in investigating potential Espionage Act violations by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (read more)

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