On Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz published a report on the investigation of President Trump’s ties with Russia, which the FBI conducted in the summer of 2016.
The publication of this document was awaited. Trump's enemies were waiting, hoping that Horowitz would help the FBI launder charges of breaking the law during investigative activities. Supporters of the president were waiting, because if the inspector managed to prove that the bureau was breaking the law, this would give Trump a trump card against the Democrats, who were engaged in impeachment fuss. Trump himself was also waiting - as he said in an interview with Fox News, this report will be a “historic event” and possibly cause “the biggest scandal in US history.”
And then the day came when Horowitz presented to the public a 434-page Talmud under the boring title, “An Overview of Four FISA Orders and Other Aspects of the FBI Cross Hurricane Operation.”
And ... nothing happened. The sky did not fall to the earth. The arrests of the Feebers who were implicated in the conspiracy of a “deep state” against the president did not begin. On the other hand, the Democrats in Congress also do not look too joyful - Horowitz’s report did not give them any reinforced concrete arguments to remove the president from office.
At the same time, the very fact of publication caused great revival in the American press. But in full accordance with the unwritten rules of the great Washington game, each media, depending on their membership in a particular camp, tried to interpret the conclusions of the inspector of the Ministry of Justice in their favor.
“The Justice Department inspector general accused the bureau of errors and inconsistencies, but found that his decision to launch an investigation into Trump’s campaign was correct,” says Politico journalist John Gerstein. “The Justice Department’s report on the FBI’s investigation into a potential conspiracy between Trump’s election campaign and Russia didn’t show any direct evidence of political bias at the start of the investigation, but revealed an awkward set of inaccuracies and omissions on the part of the FBI that marred a court order to monitor a former Trump campaign adviser.” .
“Inaccuracy”, “omissions”, “inaccuracies” are just euphemisms for indicating much more serious violations. All the interpreters hope that few will take the trouble to study the whole voluminous work of the inspector of the Ministry of Justice. However, such people were found in the editorial office of the independent Internet portal ZeroHedge.
“The report concludes that, despite the fact that almost all investigators hated President Trump, and that the evidence was fabricated by at least one FBI prosecutor, and that they misrepresented Christopher Steele’s credentials, none of these“ biases ”“ spoiled ” "The investigation, and the main process was not substantiated," writes the ZeroHedge columnist, hiding under the pseudonym Tyler Darden (the hero of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel “Fight Club” and the movie of the same name by David Fincher).
What are we talking about?
I already wrote that in January 2018, Republicans in Congress discussed a four-page memorandum of abuse committed by the FBI under the FISA - the Secret Intelligence Surveillance Act. Then this thin document produced the effect of an exploding bomb in Congress, and the Democrats, through the mouth of their main anti-Trump Adam Schiff, announced that the Republicans were “ready to burn the FBI.”
But no one was burned by the FBI, the memorandum was never published, but the Ministry of Justice began work to verify the activities of the bureau, which (lo and behold!) Took a little less than two years.
Like the 2018 memorandum, Horowitz’s report focuses on how the FBI, using the FISA act, allows security services to “conduct physical and electronic surveillance procedures” (in other words, monitor, wiretap and read letters from American citizens suspected of having contacts with “foreign agents”). Powers ”), gathered incriminating evidence on Donald Trump and his employees during the 2016 presidential campaign. Horowitz's report focuses on Carter Page, a former Trump adviser whom the FBI suspected of working for Russian intelligence. There was no reason to follow Page, but the FBI fabricated the data necessary to obtain a FISA order, in particular, relying on the notorious Steel's dossier - a compilation of compromising information (mostly fake) on Trump, “reflecting” his ties with Russia and prepared by the former MI6 British Intelligence Officer Christopher Steele. As a result, the FBI, applying to the FISA court, presented Carter Page as an “agent of a foreign power”, although the bureau did not have any real evidence for this, only Steel's dossier.
In other words, the bureau really wanted to find at least some evidence to accuse Trump and his team of having links with a “foreign power”, and in pursuit of this goal, his employees, firstly, repeatedly violated the law, and secondly, they themselves used the materials collected by a representative of a foreign intelligence service.
“For the attentive reader, Horowitz’s report sets out the background to Mueller’s investigation. And he is full of luscious details about the Trump campaign staff and investigators' attempts to understand their motives and actions, ”intrigues the CNN reader.
And indeed: it suddenly turned out that the British intelligence officer Steele was closely acquainted with Trump’s daughter Ivanka (though Horowitz simply calls her “a member of the Trump family”, but cunning journalists have already identified who they are talking about). The report noted that "Steele knew her for several years" and that "the couple was close enough for Steele to give her a Scottish family tartan."
It turns out that Steele was not chosen by chance to collect dossiers on Trump - and not even because he allegedly had “a lot of informants in Russia,” as he himself boasted in private conversations. But because he was a member of the Trump family, or at least was part of the circle of trust of Ivanka, who was almost the closest person to the president.
It also turned out that for some reason the FBI had never checked the most shocking episode from Steele’s dossier regarding Trump’s visit to Moscow in 2013, despite the fact that the “story” invented by the British, as well as many others, was quoted by everyone yellow publications: “While in Moscow in 2013, Trump stayed in the presidential room of the Ritz Carlton Hotel (earlier, US leader Barack Obama spent the night on one of his official trips).
Out of hatred for the latter, Trump hired prostitutes, forcing them to urinate in the bed where Obama once slept with his wife Michelle. The hotel was controlled by the FSB with the help of bugs and hidden cameras, thanks to which the Russian secret services received incriminating evidence on Trump. " It would seem that the FBI should have seized on this information and checked at least the existence of videos confirming the scandalous story.
Nothing of the kind was done, because the bureau understood from the very beginning: all the "Steel dossiers" are fake from top to bottom.
And many, many other evidences that the US special services (a country proud of the rule of law principle) simply wiped their feet on the law can be found in a thick report by Michael Horowitz - there would be a desire.
Following the publication of Horowitz’s report, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, citing her experience with law enforcement, said that “the American people should be scared that this could happen to everyone.”
85 years ago, the American writer Sinclair Lewis wrote the novel "It is impossible with us" about the advent of fascism in the United States. For many years, it seemed like a terrible fairy tale, that a police state could never replace powerful American diplomacy, that a system of separation of powers reliably protects America from dictatorial regimes and the omnipotence of special services.
But Trump came to the White House - a man who is very disliked by American liberals and globalists. And somehow it turned out by itself that the law (in this case, FISA) is just a piece of paper that powerful intelligence agencies can dispose of at their own discretion. Including - use instead of the toilet.
Jerry Nadler, head of the House of Representatives Judicial Committee and Caroline Maloney, chairman of the oversight committee, who have been active in the show called “impeachment to Trump,” have already said they “welcome” Horowitz’s report, as his report “indicates that the investigation was underway by special prosecutor Mueller was not politically motivated and that the officials acted appropriately by initiating an investigation. ” But, even struggling to minimize the number of violations discovered by Horowitz (“some problems with FISA orders from lower-level employees”), the Democrats cannot hide the serious concern that the conclusions of the inspector general will play into the hands of Trump supporters. “The president, his congressional advocates and right-wing media will continue to support these conspiracy theories in order to evade the president’s misconduct, but we will not pay attention to their unfounded accusations,” said Nadler and Maloney. “President Trump is a constant threat to our elections and the holiness of our democracy.”
For Democrats, publishing Horowitz’s report is bad news because it indirectly hits Joe Biden, their main hope in the 2020 election.
“I officially declare: under Obama and Biden, the FBI, led by Komi (James Komi, the former head of the FBI. - K. B. ), used the dirt collected by the Democratic Party to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign, and then brazenly used this false information to update warrants. Absolute abuse of power! ”Wrote Ronna McDaniel, chairman of the Republican Party National Committee, on her Twitter.
And this is a very alarming call for Biden: if the Republicans grab a bone inadvertently thrown by him by Horowitz, it will not be easy to refute accusations of abuse of power to old Joe.
Trump himself, at a meeting with Republican senators, said: “What happened and what happened in our country is a shame. This is incredible, far worse than I could have imagined. This should never be repeated with another president. ”
He added that the investigation was “concocted” and that the security services did something that “probably never happened in the history of our country.”
“They fabricated evidence and lied to the court,” Trump continued. “It was an attempted coup, many were involved in it, and they were caught.”
Saying “caught”, Trump does not mean that one of the conspirators is in prison. No, according to the current FBI Director Christopher Ray, the defendants in the Horowitz report simply lost their posts in the bureau and no longer work there.
However, the main intrigue is that in the story with the operation "Cross Hurricane" the point has not yet been set. Regardless of the work of the Horowitz team, the Justice Department is continuing a separate internal investigation conducted by prosecutor John Durham under the personal supervision of US Attorney General William Barr (a large, it should be noted, supporter of the president). On Monday, Durham made a statement in which he emphasized that he has serious questions for the inspector of the Ministry of Justice Horowitz. “Last month, we notified the Inspector General that we did not agree with some of the conclusions of his report regarding intentionality (investigation) and how the FBI was instituted,” said a Connecticut prosecutor.
Unlike the Horowitz investigation, the Durham investigation is criminal in nature, that is, it considers criminal offenses committed by the FBI. “Republicans,” Fox News writes, “can use it to identify irregularities that the inspector general did not consider.”
So the main battle, as well as the high-profile arrests and landings in Washington, is yet to come.
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.