Here’s the article from Smirking Chimp, a website I used to respect:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/cody-fenwick/87578/long-awaited-doj-revi...

At the heart of all this is the right-wing theory that the Russia investigation, particularly the element that probed connections between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin effort to interfere in the 2016 election, was an unjustified political attack. This would be a great abuse of the Justice Department and an egregious civil rights violation, at the very least. But according to three new reports published Friday from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, Horowitz’s forthcoming report will find that the investigation was properly predicated. Of course, this shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who read Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. Even though it did not find enough evidence to charge a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, it found extensive evidence of suspicious and troubling ties between the two sides that undoubtedly warranted investigatory scrutiny. The Times reported: “[The] draft report … concludes that the F.B.I. had enough evidence to meet the legal standard for opening the investigation, though Mr. Horowitz emphasized that the bar is low, the people said.”

What the author doesn’t tell us – and what Horowitz may not know, because the scope of his investigation was limited – was that the “troubling ties” between Trump campaign officials and Russians were set-ups that Brennan coordinated with Five Eyes allies. Mifsud, Sater, Greenberg, Downer, Thompson, and others all clearly worked in coordination to attempt to entrap Carter Page, Papadopoulos, and Roger Stone. The only REAL contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials were Flynn’s fully appropriate discussions with the Russian ambassador, the Trump Tower meeting (which Clinton’s hire Fusion GPS helped to set up), and Carter Page’s innocuous conversations with Russians at international conferences.

And the legal basis for opening the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign – Papadopoulos’s comment that he had been told by Mifsud that the Russians had Hillary emails – is an absurd and corrupt basis for such an investigation. Everyone and his brother at the time was speculating that Russia, as well as other major states, had hacked the emails on Hilary’s unprotected SOS server. And Papadopoulos’ comment was hearsay of hearsay of hearsay. Further, there is no reason to suspect that Papadopoulos – or anyone else in the Trump campaign – had assisted “the Russians” in obtaining either Hillary’s emails, or those of the DNC and Podesta published by Wikileaks. The proper response to Papadopoulos’s comment would have been to go interview Mifsud – not to investigate the Trump campaign. If Horowitz doesn’t make these points, he has screwed up egregiously.

The report is also said to conclude that Joseph Mifsud, a Russia-linked professor who told a Trump campaign official that Russia had damaging information on Mrs. Clinton in the form of hacked Democratic emails — a key fact used to open the investigation — was not an F.B.I. informant. That undercuts an assertion of conservative critics of the inquiry.

When did anyone assert that Mifsud was an FBI informer? He was tightly associated with British intelligence, and there would have been no need for him to report to the FBI. Almost surely, he was recruited by his British intelligence contacts to set up Papadopoulos. There is zero possibility that Mifsud was just a nice garrulous guy sharing some rumors – he was consciously screwing with Papadopoulos, introducing him to a phony “niece” of Putin.

The author also pushes the evident canard that Mifsud had been referring to the DNC emails released by Wikileaks ("Democratic emails"). This leaves the impression that Mifsud had knowledge of the "hacking" of these emails in advance of their release - suggesting that he did indeed have privileged inside info from the Russian government. But, in the context of the time, it was evident that Mifsud had been referring to Hillary's deleted SOS emails - which EVERYONE was speculating about. And Mifsud imparted this claim to Papadopoulos on April 26th, 2016, allegedly after being told about this by Russian officials while on a recent trip to Russia. Whereas the DNC emails were exfiltrated in two batches on the 23rd and 25th of April. Mifsud could not possibly have learned about this on his previous trip to Russia. For US officials or the author to imply that Mifsud had been referring to the DNC emails is a gross fraud.

None of the evidence used to open the investigation came from the C.I.A. or from a notorious dossier of claims about Trump-Russia ties compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent whose research was funded by Democrats, the report concludes, according to the people briefed on it.

No, that evidence was used to fraudulently obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

…while Mr. Horowitz criticizes F.B.I. leadership for its handling of the highly fraught Russia investigation in some ways, he made no finding of politically biased actions by top officials Mr. Trump has vilified like the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey; Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy who temporarily ran the bureau after the president fired Mr. Comey in 2017; and Peter Strzok, a former top counterintelligence agent.

In fact, the US officials who signed off on the FISA applications on Carter Page certified that the info in the applications – consisting largely of excerpts from the Steele dossier – had been verified. In fact, much of the dossier was ludicrous on its face, and NONE of it should have been believed without verification. Furthermore, the applicants did not explicitly state that the Clinton campaign had commissioned the dossier as opposition research. They presented an article by Michael Isikoff as seemingly independent confirmation – whereas Isikoff’s report was based on info from Steele. And while referring to Carter Page’s past interactions with Russians, it failed to note that Page had successfully collaborated with the FBI to nail several Russian spies. For the FBI/DOJ to claim that Page was acting as a Russian agent – which is what they needed to do to get the FISA warrants - was a simply gross miscarriage of justice.

If Horowitz does indeed conclude that the Deep Staters involved in this farce were simply making innocent errors, and weren’t operating out of severe animus toward Trump, then he is a tremendous fool.

But here’s a point that Larry Johnson makes in a recent essay:

I think it is important to lower expectations about what the Horowitz report will accomplish. It is not an indictment. It is an audit. It will present findings of deficiencies without reaching conclusions about bias or motives of those who behaved illegally or incompetently. That is not Horowitz's job. But the report will provide criminal referrals, though that will not likely be specifically mentioned in the report. This is an important step in setting the stage for John Durham to press forward with the criminal investigation.

https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/11/are-the-coup...

In other words, if Horowitz fails to make conclusions about bias or motive, that’s not what his investigation was intended to do – it merely intends to report the facts that Horowitz managed to unearth. And, given that it is said to be 500 pages long, there must be lots of facts about lots of “errors”.

Here's is Johnson's discussion of what the Horowitz report SHOULD contain:

https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/11/revisiting-t...

Expect Durham, who undoubtedly is looking into Brennan’s efforts as far back as 2015 to work with Five Eyes allies to set up Trump associates – thereby providing an excuse for the FBI to surveil them “legally” – to give us a full picture of the seditious conspiracy, and to bring the necessary indictments.