The Inspector General’s FISA abuse investigation is officially complete, pending classification review.
It’s taken a while, but at long last, the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on FISA abuses by the Justice Department and FBI is done. I.G. Michael Horowitz sent word to Attorney General William Barr on Thursday.
The Washington Examiner reports, “Horowitz said in a letter to congressional leaders that his team is in the ‘process of finalizing our report by providing a draft of our factual findings to the Department and FBI for classification determination and marking.’ Once redactions are made and the report is returned to the inspector general, Horowitz’s team will ‘proceed with our usual process for preparing final draft public and classified reports, and ensuring that appropriate reviews occur for accuracy and comment purposes.’”
The investigation examined the FISA application and three renewals from October 2016 to surveil Carter Page, a Trump campaign advisor. They relied on an unverified “dossier” with alleged dirt on candidate Donald Trump that was generated by former British spy Christopher Steele, who had been hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS and funded by Hillary Clinton and the DNC.
Unfortunately, this obvious bias and conflict of interest was kept hidden from the FISA court, who made decisions on erroneous or misleading informmation. These FISA filings were approved by the top echelon at the FBI and Justice Department. This would include former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (who appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller to be special counsel a month earlier), among others.
In his letter, Horowitz stated, “As I noted in my June correspondence to you, my direction to our team has been to follow the evidence wherever it leads and to complete the review as quickly as possible. Consistent with this guidance, the team has reviewed over one million records and conducted over 100 interviews, including several of witnesses who only recently agreed to be interviewed.”
Hopefully the classification process will not be dilatory due to political concerns from the left. This needs to be made public, post haste.
sua sponte 