Cont’d from above...
The IG’s second tack involves the facts he chooses to present. The report is truly half-baked because it omits half the story — all Clinton emails, no Trump-Russia. Of course, that’s neither how the cases evolved, nor how the investigators looked at them.
When Ted Cruz dropped out of the GOP presidential race, making Trump the de facto nominee, the very first thing Strzok said upon hearing the news from Page was, “Now the pressure really starts to finish MYE” — i.e., “Mid Year Exam,” the code name for the Clinton caper. The best way to “stop” Trump was to free Hillary to beat him. So, the bureau simultaneously labored to close the case on her and invent a case on him.
In the blink of an eye, then-director Comey was briefing Obama’s National Security Council on Carter Page; the Obama intelligence agencies were tapping their foreign partners, targeting Trump-campaign advisers to run informants at, and internalizing the Steele dossier. While the FBI scooped up the last laptops it needed to complete the predetermined closing of the emails probe, Attorney General Lynch had her convenient tarmac chat with Bill Clinton, and the bureau conducted the perfunctory interview with Hillary — an interview so pointless that the FBI and Justice Department did not object to the presence of Mrs. Clinton’s co-conspirators in the room, even though the IG report concedes that this flouted elementary investigative protocols.
Meanwhile, here is Strzok, having finished the Clinton interview and closed out the emails case, preparing to wing his way to London to conduct some real interviews — interviews with witnesses who might help him “stop” Trump:
And damn this feels momentous. Because this matters. The other one did, too, but that was to ensure that we didn’t F something up. This matters because this MATTERS.
Get it? This, the Trump case, “MATTERS” in comparison to the Clinton case. The only thing that mattered in the Clinton case was that the FBI avoid doing anything too grossly indefensible in implementing the months-long strategy to close the case without charges after appearing to do an energetic investigation. But the Trump case matters because it “MATTERS” — because in the Trump case, Strzok and Page and the others actually get to do what the FBI usually does: make a case on a bad guy we have to “stop” — informants, wiretaps, subpoenas, predawn search warrants with guns drawn, charging people who lie to us, threatening decades of imprisonment against witnesses we’re trying to flip.
How do you best evaluate the FBI’s approach to the Clinton case? Well, if I may invoke that term again, common sense says you look at how the same agents handled another case which bore on the same event that informed their every decision, the 2016 election. The question is not whether every Clinton-case decision was defensible considered in isolation; it is whether the quality of justice afforded to two sides of the same continuum by the same agents at the same time was . . . the same.
It wasn’t. One was kid gloves, the other was scorched earth. The candidate they hoped would win got the former; the candidate they needed to “stop” got the latter. The candidate they were almost certain would win got the case dropped; the candidate they needed an “insurance policy” against . . . well, whaddya know — the case against him is still going . . . and going . . . and going.
Did bias have anything to do with that? In 568 pages that leave out the Trump half of the story, we’re told the answer is, “Who really knows?”
I think we know.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...not-supported/
ETA: link below to complete 568 page IG report.
https://www.justice.gov/file/1071991/download