U.S. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz arrives to testify before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., December 11, 2019. (Erin Scott/Reuters)

Five things we haven’t discussed regarding the various IG reports.

1) Are FISA judges so naive that they would accept DOJ and FBI submissions of transparently weak evidence supported mostly by Steele’s amateurishly composed dossier? And if they were notified that the information was the work of oppositional research, why did they not simply ask who paid for it? Who were the judges who signed these fraudulently produced requests, and are they subject to judicial review?


2) What was the actual role of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who signed a FISA application and according to Andrew McCabe discussed ways of wearing a wire to record private conversations with the president in order to find support to invoke the 25th Amendment?

3) There appears to be no evidence for the FBI contention that its operatives did not warn candidate Trump of collusion investigations of his campaign, because of legitimate fears he might be involved. And this FBI alibi operated in a larger landscape in which James Comey in a private conversation with the president later misled him about ongoing investigations, then memorialized his version of that confidential conversation, and then leaked that information to the press (earning him a criminal referral from the IG), and a McCabe-Rosenstein conversation about potentially entrapping the president to reveal evidence on tape of alleged mental instability to fuel a 25th Amendment motion. In sum, the degree to which the FBI decided to brief the president seems entirely contingent on its ongoing efforts to entrap, mislead, or set him up.

3) If Hillary Clinton hired foreign national Christopher Steele, through three firewalls of the DNC, Perkins Coie, and Fusion GPS to find dirt on her political opponent, through his use of one or more Russian sources, why has she not been called before Congress to testify about what seems to be a clear violation of the law governing the use of foreign nationals in a U.S. campaign? Did she not use Russian sources to attempt to damage her opponent and thereby to warp the 2016 election?



4) Was there one major principal in the Horowitz report — Comey, McCabe, Steele, the Ohrs, Downer, Strzok, Page, Clinesmith, etc. — who either had not given some prior evidence — in texts, emails, statements — of anti-Trump bias, or did not have conflicts of interest involving receiving Clinton-related cash or donating to Clinton related entities?

5) Was there one cited example of wrongdoing in Appendix A of the Horowitz that could be remotely interpreted as evidence of pro-Trump bias? If not, why not?