For starters, let’s get this out of the way. Attorney General William Barr has been doing an excellent job. He’s getting to the bottom of this Russian collusion nonsense that's engulfed the nation for the past two years only to have it exposed as a total myth. Barr has also praised new FBI Director Christopher Wray, who is slowly rebuilding the reputation of an agency that has been marred by controversy.
But these guys weren’t there when the bureau and the Department of Justice were absolute disasters. To recap, we had top FBI officials discuss how to use the 25th Amendment to remove Trump. That’s a coup. Even liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz admitted this was the case. There’s no other way to describe it. Former top counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer, exchanged tens of thousands of texts, most of them anti-Trump. They referenced an “insurance policy,” which many have alleged is the Trump dossier, which set off this whole circus. Strzok reportedly was one of the people who signed off on the counterintelligence probe into Russian collusion that was eventually taken over by Robert Mueller. He was also a key person in the FBI’s analysis of Hillary Clinton’s email server. Page and Strzok worried that the bureau might be going too hard on Clinton. The Department of Justice Inspector General’s office conducted a review of the two FBI employees during its review of Hillary Clinton’s email server and found no evidence of bias.
Wait, excuse me—there was no bias? Even Lisa Page admitted the texts that trashed Trump meant exactly what they said, while Strzok tried to pass the damning communications off as a sign of his patriotism and that it’s not really indicative of bias. CNN wasn’t even going to polish that turd. And then there’s this exchange included in the report:
"No bias at the FBI" or something. This exchange is nuts. pic.twitter.com/uUj0NlYNAf
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) June 14, 2018
The second exchange we identified occurred on November 9, 2016, the day after the presidential election. FBI Attorney 2 and another FBI employee who was not involved in the Midyear investigation exchanged the following instant messages. Note that the sender of the instant message is identified after the timestamp and intervening messages that did not contribute to the understanding of this exchange are not included.
09:38:14, FBI Attorney 2: “I am numb.”
09:55:35, FBI Employee: “I can’t stop crying.”
10:00:13, FBI Attorney 2: “That makes me even more sad.”
10:43:20, FBI Employee: “Like, what happened?”
10:43:37, FBI Employee: “You promised me this wouldn’t happen. YOU PROMISED.”
10:43:43, FBI Employee: Okay, that might have been a lie...”
10:43:46, FBI Employee: “I’m very upset.”
10:43:47, FBI Employee: “haha”
10:51:48, FBI Attorney 2: “I am so stressed about what I could have done differently.”
10:54:29, FBI Employee: “Don’t stress. None of that mattered.” 10:54:31, FBI Employee: “The FBI’s influence.”
10:59:36, FBI Attorney 2: “I don’t know. We broke the momentum.” 11:00:03, FBI Employee: “That is not so.”
11:02:22, FBI Employee: “All the people who were initially voting for her would not, and were not, swayed by any decision the FBI put out. Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS that think he will magically grant them jobs for doing nothing. They probably didn’t watch the debates, aren’t fully educated on his policies, and are stupidly wrapped up in his unmerited enthusiasm.”
417
11:11:43, FBI Attorney 2: “I’m just devastated. I can’t wait until I can leave today and just shut off the world for the next four days.”
11:12:06, FBI Employee: “Why are you devastated?”
11:12:18, FBI Employee: “Yes, I’m not watching tv for four years.”
11:14:16, FBI Attorney 2: “I just can’t imagine the systematic disassembly of the progress we made over the last 8 years. ACA is gone.Who knows if the rhetoric about deporting people, walls, and crap is true. I honestly feel like there is going to be a lot more gun issues, too, the crazies won finally. This is the tea party on steroids. And the GOP is going to be lost, they have to deal with an incumbent in 4 years. We have to fight this again. Also Pence is stupid.”
11:14:58, FBI Employee: “Yes that’s all true.”
11:15:01, FBI Attorney 2: “And it’s just hard not to feel like the FBI caused some of this. It was razor thin in some states.”
11:15:09, FBI Employee: “Yes it was very thin.”
11:15:23, FBI Attorney 2: “Plus, my god damned name is all over the legal documents investigating his staff.”
11:15:24, FBI Employee: “But no I absolutely do not believe the FBI had any part.”
11:15:33, FBI Attorney 2: “So, who knows if that breaks to him what he is going to do.”
This is insane. There was no bias, really? The FBI was shell-shocked over Trump’s win.
Strzok was fired over his texts, which embarrassed the bureau and damaged its credibility as a professional and impartial investigative body. He wasn’t the only one. Former FBI Director James Comey was fired for cause, as well. First, the Strzok drama occurred under Comey's watch. Second, Comey went way outside of department policy by purposefully handing over memos he had taken during his meetings with Trump to a friend so they could be leaked to the press. This was done to get a special counsel investigation going—and that’s exactly what happened.
Why? Oh, was it because of the Trump dossier that the FBI appears to have never verified? And if the FBI had verified it, would the bureau have found out that this was all a hoax, to begin with? Maybe. And why didn’t the FBI do an extensive vetting of this document? There are glaring errors in the dossier, which was a political opposition research project that was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democrats using an ex-MI6 spook, Christopher Steele, who was contracted through Fusion GPS, a research firm. Key people at that firm had FBI ties, like Nellie and Bruce Ohr. Nellie was the firm's Russia expert, while Bruce was a top-level FBI official who had met with Steele. Mr. Ohr was later demoted. This whole FBI-Steele-Fusion nexus is…well, when you think of the deep state—this could be a prime example. Oh, and Strzok was also demoted to working in human resources before he was fired upon the discovery of his anti-Trump screeds.
In a more serious example, the FBI simply couldn’t see why James Hodgkinson, a radical left-wing activist and Bernie Sanders supporter, would target congressional Republicans practicing for an annual baseball game with their Democratic colleagues in 2017. Hodgkinson had a history of spewing hatred toward the GOP. He had two firearms to commit the act. He had pictures of the field that the GOP congressmen were going to practice at and also had a kill list. This was premeditated. This was a mass assassination attempt, and Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) was nearly killed. And yet, the conclusion was that this was a “spontaneous” act. Oh, and it’s not even an act of terrorism.
Do we have a ‘see no evil,’ or more aptly a ‘see no bias’ issue at the DOJ? When you flesh out all the drama, it’s just not believable, even though I think the DOJ IG’s office has been doing good work.
Steele told the State Department that the dossier was politically biased, days before the FBI obtained a FISA warrant for Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign. The glaring errors could have been checked with a simple Google search. That didn’t happen. Why? Given the atmosphere of the FBI at the time during the 2016 election, it wouldn’t shock us if bias played a role in this witch hunt.
With the DOJ IG report of alleged FISA abuses during the Obama administration about to drop in mid-December, the liberal media is back at the spin controls, as details leaked that the report will criticize lower-level officials for being reckless when it came to following surveillance protocols, but that political bias played no role in tainting the FBI’s investigation of possible Trump-Kremlin collusion.
No bias with the Hillary Clinton server, phantom motivations for a politically-motivated shooting, and now no bias in the FISA spy warrant application? Given the cumulative effect of this mess that was the FBI in 2016, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who is serious who would defend the position that there was no bias. There obviously was, which is why the anti-Trump deep state allegations remain a sticky point. That reached a new level with this Trump impeachment nonsense over his call to Ukrainian leaders in July, where he allegedly threatened to withhold military aid to the country unless a corruption investigation was opened into the Biden family. Hunter Biden had a cozy job with a Ukrainian energy company, despite having zero experience in this field, while his daddy was serving as vice president. Hunter Biden was there to sell access—that’s the palace intrigue. It’s something that remains an albatross around the VP’s neck as he has failed miserably to neutralize this story, and Democrats refuse to yank Hunter and Joe up on the Hill to answer simple questions about this arrangement.
Oh, and this whole impeachment fiasco occurred because a CIA agent filed a complaint. This person is a registered Democrat, had worked with a 2020 Democratic candidate, and made contact with Rep. Adam Schiff’s staff prior to filing their complaint. Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee and starting QB for this effort, knew the contents of the complaint before it was filed, but all of this is on the up-and-up, right? There’s no bias here too, right?
Virtually no bias from the FBI during 2016—some folks think they can sell that. It’s simply not believable.