Don's Tuesday Column

            THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News   6/19/2018

Documented bias, rule-breaking

It seems that the obsession by the partisan news media--partisan by their voting patterns, political contributions and slant in favor of the Democrat/progressive side in reporting--extends to effectively "white washing" or sanitizing even documented perfidy. Even when that perfidy would normally prompt their news noses to zero in on culpable, ethically corrupt government officials. Hence, when the Inspector General's (IG's) report came out last Friday, the cherry picking and spin extended to seizing on statements that reinforced a narrative favorable to Obama's DOJ/FBI while ignoring other parts of the report that contradicted said statements.

In particular, media news readers, and their like-minded analysts and opiners, were quick to proclaim "no political bias" based on Mr. Horowitz's summary while skipping all of the references elsewhere in the report that reeked of and displayed blatant political motivations and practices of bias and favoritism. Even though the IG report's purview was the investigation of Hillary Clinton's private, nongovernmental email server, it included voluminous emails between FBI agents and executives showing their negative obsession with Donald Trump.

The report's title stated, moreover, that it was "a review of various actions of the FBI and DOJ in advance of the 2016 election." It was, to any objective reader, a highly critical and damning document to those agencies and their personnel. Another Inspector and IG report will necessarily focus on the FBI's actions and decisions that led to opening an investigation of Donald Trump and the Trump campaign before the election.

The material contained in this report, like the agents and principals in the government's investigative apparatus, had much to do with both Hillary and Trump. The emails show the wider focus that proves deep bias. To put it short, they used the lightest possible standard to effect an exoneration of Hillary, while straining the law, policies and espionage practices against Trump.

The first takeaway is that if what is in the IG report was known before the 2016 election, Donald Trump's win, both in votes and in the Electoral College, would have been greater and more decisive than what actually occurred. The second revelation is that there was an "October surprise" in that the FBI attempted to squelch the report of Anthony Weiner's laptop--he was the husband of Hillary Clinton's top aide Huma Abedin--and that its contents included tons of Clinton's emails. Many classified government emails.

"Third, there was an extensive PR campaign, including the briefing of all former FBI agents they could reach on how they could spin this. But fourth and most damning, the intrusion analysis on Secretary Clinton's server, summarized on page 75 and 76, shows indeed there was at least one compromise of the server that was discovered.

“And there is a conclusion that sophisticated adversaries could cover their tracks in and out of the server. And that the draft of the report, by former FBI Director Comey, went in the first draft, from concluding that ‘it was reasonably likely' that hostile actors had invaded the server, to the final draft that 'it was possible.'"

The report points to the many and obvious professional collapses of the "Mid Year Team" (focused on Hillary's email server) when it came to technique and ethics. Hugh Hewitt, whom I quote and paraphrase, focuses on the fact that the server had to have been compromised and all the recovered and missing emails are in the possession of hostile powers; and "we still don't have a damage assessment of what the unsecured server did to all those connected to it."

Footnote 75 tells us that FBI analysts and prosecutor “2” told us that former president Barack Obama was one of the 13 individuals with whom Clinton had direct contact using her private email account. Obama, like other government officials, had a pseudonym.

The point must be made and emphasized: Obama lied through his teeth when he told the American people that he never knew of Clinton's private server until we the people learned of it--through news reports. He got and sent emails from and to her private, unapproved server. Bottom line: Hillary could not be prosecuted without exposing the fact that Obama similarly used the unsecured, illegal email and server, and thus compromised national security.

"Then begin to consider hostile actors lurking on the server, undetected, not possible of detection; just imagine what they saw and what they did with what they saw,” including the possible access to and through Obama's email to...God only knows what.

The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel has more devastating analysis. "Don't believe anyone who claims Horowitz didn't find bias. He carefully says he found no 'documentary evidence' that bias produced 'specific investigatory decisions.' It means he didn't catch anyone doing anything so dumb as writing down that they took a specific step to aid a candidate...But in fact he finds bias everywhere; the examples are shocking and concerning and he devotes entire sections to them.

"And he very specifically says in the summary that they 'cast a cloud' on the entire 'investigation's credibility.' That's pretty damning. Meanwhile, the same cast of characters who the IG has found made a hash of the Clinton investigation, who demonstrate such bias, seamlessly move to the Trump investigation. And we're supposed to think they got this one right?"

It's not about Comey's insubordination (bad enough); it's an indictment of an FBI culture that believes it's above the law and rules that it imposes on the rest of us. "People failing to adhere to their recusals; Lynch hanging with Bill; staff helping conceal details of Comey's leaks to the press from DOJ bosses. Use of personal email and laptops. Accepting gifts from media; leaks to, and agents affairs with, reporters."