The Right Prescription
Why the OIG Report Should Scare the Hell Out of You
June 18, 2018, 12:05 am
The OIG is infected by a far more dangerous disease than political bias — fear.
The Justice Department’s tepid OIG report, with its risible assertion that there was no political bias in the FBI’s Clinton email probe, suggests that it was written by people afraid to tell the unvarnished truth about the conduct of the federal government’s police apparatus, an agency that openly defies congressional oversight and has participated in a vendetta against a sitting president. The FBI’s leadership clearly hopes that the Democrats will win majorities in Congress and put a halt to the investigations into its multifarious abuses of power. The OIG is loath to face the ruthless reprisals that would inevitably follow such a disaster.
In other words, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General is filled with people who fear the FBI. Think about that for a minute. What is the usual term for a government whose members live in fear of its police arm? Ronald Reagan famously said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” The OIG report suggests that its demise may be only one election away. The following passage from the report’s Executive Summary is a cowardly exercise in bureaucratic dissembling deliberately worded to let corrupt FBI officials off the hook and provide talking points for its equally dishonest apologists:
[We] did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed … we found that these specific decisions were the result of discretionary judgments made during the course of an investigation by the Midyear agents and prosecutors and that these judgment calls were not unreasonable.
It doesn’t matter that this pusillanimous drivel is refuted by the findings reported in the depths of the full 568-page report. It was immediately deployed by the usual suspects in the legacy “news” media, and even the agency’s current director, to whitewash the behavior of Comey, McCabe, Strzok, and the rest of the rogue bureaucrats posing as law enforcement officials. If the ill effects of this report are not obvious, consider the response of the FBI’s current director, the guy who was supposed to be a trade up from the solipsistic stuffed shirt fired by President Trump. Here is Christopher Wray’s rote recitation of the FBI party line:
I take this report very seriously, and we accept its findings and recommendations. It’s also important to note what the inspector general did not find. The report did not find any evidence of political bias or improper consideration actually impacting the investigation under review. But the report does identify errors of judgment, violations of or disregard for policy, and decisions that, at the very least, in hindsight, were not the best choices.
And, in the cause of halting further investigations into deep state skulduggery, the Democrats immediately used the OIG report to attack the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes. Nunes has spearheaded the House investigation into the interference of executive branch agencies in the 2016 election and their attempts to hobble the Trump administration. California Democrat Adam Schiff has been working the talking head circuit to weave ironic conspiracy theories about Nunes’ conduct. Schiff went on Meet the Press yesterday to speculate about data received by the committee from the FBI:
[I]t is deeply disturbing because if this was shared by New York field agents with Devin Nunes, was it also shared with Rudy Giuliani? Or did Devin Nunes do something which we have seen subsequently which is coordinate with the Trump team? Was this information shared by the committee with Rudy Giuliani or shared directly with them? We don’t know the answer but we hope the inspector general will find out.
Schiff is, of course, a pathological liar. This has been documented by a number of news outlets, including the Federalist, in this story by Mollie Hemingway. But the truth isn’t what matters to any of the Democrats as the midterms approach. They know there is more damning evidence on the way if they don’t stop the investigations of the chicanery that went on before and after Trump was elected. Schiff and his accomplices are up to their necks in it and the most urgent priority on the “to do” list of a newly elected Democratic majority in either House of Congress will be the abrupt termination of any related committee investigations.
This is not conjecture. Both the Democrats and their media toadies have been dropping none-too-subtle hints about it since they began fantasizing about a “blue wave.” Last week Elizabeth Warren expressed fear that the Democratic Party might not win either the House or Congress: “I run every day filled with terror that it won’t because Donald Trump remains in control of the House and the Senate.” When asked how the Democrats could accomplish anything with only partial control of the government she answered, “They can do it partly by stopping some of the bleed.” Thomas Friedman explains what that means in the New York Times:
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It is up to the Democrats to… get hold of at least one lever of power — the House or the Senate—in order to oust the most corrupt Republican lawmakers who lead key committees… to protect the F.B.I., the Justice Department and Robert Mueller from Trump’s intimidation.
In other words, the Democrats want to win in November to protect corrupt executive branch departments from their boss. That would be Donald Trump, who won the presidency in a free and fair election. This is what should scare you about the OIG report. The Inspector General is not merely afraid of reprisals from the most powerful government police organ on the planet, his report hedges his bets because he isn’t sure that our democratically elected representatives are going to win the war they are fighting with the deep state. He knows that if the Democrats win in November, the deep state will devolve into a police state.
