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Home » Why did the Democrats and the MSM appear to be so happy with the Horowitz Report?

Why did the Democrats and the MSM appear to be so happy with the Horowitz Report?

The New Neo Posted on by

Some or all of the following:

(1) They’re pretending; it’s all for show and propaganda.

(2) The report contained a bunch of statements which they believed they could spin successfully to a public unlikely to actually read any of the report or the commentary on it from the right, and therefore will never hear the things in it that implicate the FBI and the Democrats and vindicate Trump and his staff.

(3) After setting the idea in many people’s minds that the Hororwitz Report “exonerated” the FBI from any wrongdoing of any consequence, then – if and when Barr and/or Durham come up with indictments of some of the players – the Democrats will be able to successfully (in the public’s eyes, anyway) claim that Barr and Durham are the ones framing those charged, because of course Horowitz had exonerated all of them.

All of this rests on the probably correct supposition that only the most dedicated of political junkies will read the Horowitz Report or take a look at the right’s discussions of the points in it. I don’t know whether this approach by the Democrats and the MSM will ultimately be successful in electoral terms. But I understand that the foundation of the theory behind it is a reliance on public ignorance combined with the inherent complexity of following the story’s details.

Comments

Why did the Democrats and the MSM appear to be so happy with the Horowitz Report? — 30 Comments

  2. One of the things about this whole thing that has been somewhat known for awhile is the FBI would site news articles as some kind of evidence to justify getting warrants and often times these articles were planted by the same sources as used in the application.

    This is outrageous and again I question the go along judges for not strongly pushing back against this.

    I mean how is this different from a homocide detective telling a newspaper reporter that the husband is the number one suspect in his wife’s murder then citing the newspaper article to get a search warrant against the husband.

  4. Look–anyone who read Pravda in the heyday of the Soviet Union knows what is going on here. Who believed Pravda? No one in the Soviet Union.

  6. One of the first things I heard about the report from the media was that it summarized the mistakes made by the DOJ and FBI in its presentations to the FISC as “clerical errors.” Is that true? Did Horowitz purposefully give ammo to both sides?

  7. Amadeus 48:

    I would wager that some people in the USSR actually did believe Pravda. But probably a smaller percentage of the population than believes the MSM in this country at present. I personally know many people who are fully onboard with the Times and WaPo.

  8. They’re happy the IG report doesn’t recommend bringing criminal charges against anybody in the gov’t.

    I think it SHOULD be the IG’s job to do that, if gov’t folk are acting like criminals. I’m not sure that is the job, tho.

    Like Comey, Horowitz is claiming no documentary evidence about the intent of the mistakes/ criminal behavior. Like Comey, Horowitz lists lots of mistakes, which are criminal in my non-specialist mind. Unlike Comey, Horowitz doesn’t decide whether to prosecute or not.
    He does give facts. To me, the facts indicate criminal behavior, that should call for indictments and trial.

    Horowitz didn’t call for any indictments.
    That’s what the Dems call “exoneration”, in the case of Dems. (Wasn’t when Mueller didn’t call for indictment of POTUS).
    With Dem media pushing, I’d guess most NYT readers & Dem true-believers would say Trump was NOT exonerated, but the FBI was.

    This remains essentially true until there actually are indictments against some top Dems.

  11. You know…I’d rather have people either not read the report or straight up lie about it than get David French’s response where he acknowledges at least some of what the IG report shows but then not only declines to issue a mea culpa for his past incorrect pronouncements on the subject but pretends no such admission is needed.

    Since French has recycled the most obnoxious Democratic talking points in his columns, acknowledging something is rotten in the FBI is a come down for him.

    I don’t think you’re going to get too many admissions from French, because (I suspect) the motor of the NeverTrump dispensation has been vanity. They went out on a limb in 2015 and 2016 and they don’t wish to acknowledge that they misjudged the situation. Others are notable for despising the social type with the most affinity for the President (Kevin Williamson’s an example of that) or, at least, preferring the trans-national fancy bourgeois to the rest of us (see Jay Nordlinger yapping that ‘Americans by choice’ make ‘the best Americans’). They are more and more a coterie with a certain amount of donor money in their pockets but no constituency.

  13. TommyJay – No “clerical errors” are identified anywhere in the report by that name, but a little spinning could pull them out.
    As Neo said, there are only a relatively few political junkies who will bother to check any gossip (aka news reports) against the report itself, although that is very easy to do. (ctrl-F and enter your term in the search bar)

    [OI is Office of Intelligence (I found that abbreviation in a single footnote). VMU is the FBI’s Validation Management Unit. I tried to fix the wierd format that resulted from my cut-and-paste, but probably didn’t catch all the CR-LF oopsies].

    https://www.justice.gov/storage/120919-examination.pdf

    The word “clerical” does not appear in it at all.
    The word “errors” appears 52 times. (see below)

    The word “error” shows up a few times: All of the text is quotes from various pages; the numbers in () are mine.

    (p 150) The legal advisor asked OI for clarification regarding the information
    used to establish Carter Page’s use of a particular email account, and
    OI corrected an error in the description of the supporting documentation.
    (p 165) This Woods document, however, did not state or otherwise indicate that Steele only provided the information to his business associate and the FBI. Indeed, the Woods document noted that Steele told the team that he also had provided his election reports to his contacts at the State Department. Neither Case Agent 1 nor SSA 1, who performed the Woods Procedures on this application, noted this error, and it is not clear upon what basis they believed they had verified the factual assertion in the footnote about the FBI’s assessment of who provided information to the media for the September 23 news article. Both Case Agent 1 and SSA 1 told the OIG that they may have mistakenly
    been thinking the footnote said Steele gave the information to the “U.S.
    government” rather than “the FBI.”
    (p 238) The basis for this assessment-that Steele told the FBI that he “only provided his information to [Simpson] and the FBl”-was neither accurate at the time nor supported by appropriate documentation. Nevertheless, the FBI repeated this error in all three renewal applications.
    (p 240) The Supervisory Intelligence Analyst (Supervisory
    Intel Analyst) told us that although he was aware at the time, he did not recall
    making a connection between the open source reporting about Steele’s court filings and the information in the FISA application concerning Steele’s media contacts. He told us that if he had made such a connection, he would have made sure Case Agent 6 and the OGC Attorney were advised.
    According to Evans, the failure to include this information in the prior FISA
    renewals was not the most significant error identified in the Rule 13 Letter.
    (p 385) Second, we determined that it was an error for VMU to omit from the Steele validation report its finding that its assessment of Steele’s work for the FBI failed to reveal corroboration for the election reporting from the FBI and other U.S. government holdings that VMU examined.

    One footnote approaches the idea of “clerical error” but it is not really consequential – and has a typo of its own.

    (p 94) 216 We also asked about obvious errors in the reporting, such a misspellings and the reference to a Russian consulate in Miami which did not exist. Steele told us that such errors are typical in intelligence work and were a function, in part, of the fast turnaround between his receipt of information from his sources and the dissemination of the reporting.

    This section makes it look like the witnesses tried to introduce the idea of “clerical errors” by denying any knowledge of why the factual and substantial errors were made in the FISA applications.

    (p 376-377) We also found the quantity of omissions and inaccuracies in the applications and the obvious errors in the Woods Procedures deeply concerning. Although we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence of intentional misconduct on the part of the case agents who assisted OI in preparing the applications, or the agents and supervisors who performed the Woods Procedures, we also did not receive satisfactory explanations for the errors or missing information. In most instances, witnesses told us that they either did not know or recall why the information was not shared with OI, that the failure to do so may have been an oversight, that they did not recognize at the time the relevance of the information to the FISA application, or that they did not believe the missing information to be significant.
    On this last point, we believe that case agents may have improperly substituted
    their own judgments in place of the judgment of OI to consider the potential
    materiality of the information, or in place of the court to weigh the probative value
    of the information. As described above, given that certain factual misstatements were repeated in all four applications, across three different investigative teams, we also concluded that agents and supervisors failed to appropriately perform the Woods Procedures on the renewal applications by not giving much, if any, attention to re-verifying “old facts.” We recommend that the Woods Form be revised to emphasize to agents and their supervisors this obligation and to have them certify that they re-verified factual assertions repeated from prior applications.

    Because it relates to the many factual errors in the applications, this footnote might interest those who want to know what the “Woods Process” thing is all about.

    (p 418) 531 This Appendix describes errors we identified in the Woods process for the four Carter Page FISA applications. We did not examine the “facilities” section of the applications. This Appendix does not include non-Woods-related errors in the applications described in Chapters Five and Eight. As described in Chapter Two, the Woods Procedures seek to ensure the accuracy of every factual assertion in a FISA application. These procedures require that the case agent who requests an application create and maintain a “Woods File” that contains: (1) supporting documentation for every factual assertion contained in the application, and (2) results and supporting documentation of the required searches and verifications. In this appendix, we identify each factual assertion in the FISA applications for which we found (1) no supporting documentation in the Woods File, (2) purported supporting documentation in the Woods File that did not state the fact asserted in the FISA application, or (3) purported supporting documentation in the Woods File that actually indicates the fact asserted is inaccurate.
    532 The Woods Procedures require that when an application contains reporting from a Confidential Human Source (CHS), the Woods File must contain documentation from the CHS handling agent verifying that the handling agent has reviewed the facts on the CHS’s background and reliability and that the representations in the FISA about the CHS are accurate.

  14. “the Democrats will be able to successfully (in the public’s eyes, anyway) claim that Barr and Durham are the ones framing those charged”.

    In the public’s eyes? Much less so (esp. for GOP, or Trump 2016 voters), than for those Dems/ Lefties desperate for solace, after the collapse of the Mueller/ Ukraine “bribery” etc. scams.
    The Left may be aiming to inspire its flock to inflict civil disobedience, at any trial of the conspirators. As they love to chant, “No justice, no peace!”

  15. We’ve known for years that the Steele dossier was fake, but you would never know that by checking wikipedia. Just compare these two versions:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Russia_dossier

    https://infogalactic.com/info/Donald_Trump%E2%80%93Russia_dossier

    The wikipedia site on the same matter adds so much irrelevant negative information about Donald Trump that it quickly becomes an unreadable mess. And if you look at who is editing that wikipedia page, you find it is some guy who makes no secret that he is a liberal and that he dislikes Trump.

    The same whitewashing occurs on the wikipedia page for Crossfire Hurricane, where Trump and Fox News are still blamed for pushing conspiracy theories.

  16. “Horowitz didn’t call for any indictments.
    That’s what the Dems call “exoneration”, in the case of Dems. (Wasn’t when Mueller didn’t call for indictment of POTUS).” — Tom Grey

    If the Left didn’t have double standards ….

    https://nypost.com/2019/12/09/ig-report-proves-whole-investigation-was-as-corrupt-as-comey-goodwin/

    Horowitz made two crucial findings that gave Democrats and their media handmaidens some comfort. First, he found that the opening of the investigation met the department’s very low threshold requirements. Second, he found no evidence that the documented bias against Trump by agents and officials played a role in the agency’s ­decision-making or actions.

    That conclusion is generous to a fault given that all the mistakes and failures to communicate ran in the same direction as the bias. It’s more than suspicious when agents who are revealed to have said in texts and emails that they will stop Trump then conduct an investigation where all the information that doesn’t fit with guilt is somehow misplaced or ­ignored.

  17. Thanks AesopFan.

    The FoxNews guy (Cavuto I think) did not say anything to suggest that “clerical errors” was his characterization. I assumed it was something in a summary page, since he was spouting off on it very quickly after its release. Then again, Cavuto is not a Trump fan.

    That Woods Process sounds like the double and triple checking that mythx was wishing for in an earlier post. Trouble is, people involved in the Woods Process need to have the intent and determination to be honest (or at least fear of punishment) for it to be meaningful.
    _____

    Misspellings are common in intelligence work and result from the rapid turnaround. Yeah, sure.

    I read some long article several years ago that excerpted extensively from FBI 302 reports. There were many instances where the author(s) of those reports conjectured whether he/she had heard the proper names correctly, whether there were different ways to spell the proper name in subsequent document searches. (OK, fine.)

    Then, they went on to list the different possible spellings they actually considered. They’d start with one of two reasonable spellings, followed by a slew of absurd spellings. Oh boy, they sure were thorough. (cough, cough) What was really going on? Nothing good.

  19. They’re pretending; it’s all for show and propaganda.

    Cheap Talk: communication between players that does not directly affect the payoffs of the game.

    Could also be labeled whistling past the graveyard.

  20. … Barr and Durham are the ones framing those charged, because of course Horowitz had exonerated all of them.

    Yes, this will serve as adequate justification for an all-out war for control of the senate.

    Next time they impeach Trump on flimsy grounds… they’ll control both the house *and* senate and they can then successfully overthrow the duly-elected executive.

    The entire Democrat presidential field is currently dead in the water, so this may be their only sensible move.

  21. http://ace.mu.nu/archives/384695.php

    While we’re at it, wouldn’t it be sweet to carve up National Review‘s endowment among philanthropic bodies which are actually in the business of promoting starboard thought and policy? (Which don’t include The American Conservative, btw). Had quite enough of cruise-ship conservatives.

  22. The entire Democrat presidential field is currently dead in the water, so this may be their only sensible move.

    They’d get 45% of the ballots if they nominated a dead dog in the road. What’s interesting is what the Democratic electorate finds appealing. Felonia von Pantsuit still polls quite well. Among the actually competing candidates, you have Joseph Biden, a man who has never held an executive position, a man whose professional history before going into politics consisted of 4 years as an associate in a suburban law firm, a man with intellectual deficits at least as pronounced as Dan Quayle’s, a man with a history of comically blatant and self-aggrandizing lying (which included passing of Neil Kinnock’s family history as his own), a man whose paternal governance produced a train-wreck like Hunter. That he’s suffering the cognitive decline you often see in 77 year old men leaves them unperturbed. Your other choices include another biographical fabulist w/o executive experience whose signature is advocacy of state appropriation of ever greater shares of the country’s productive capacity and a mediocre business-as-usual mayor who has two other features (1) mastery of what one wag called ‘Harvard bull$hit” and (2) a manifest disinclination and incapacity to maintain a normal domestic life (which Democratic voters find appealing). Their best candidate is a 78 year old not-really-lapsed Trotskyist (who, at least, could run a municipal government capably and who, it’s a reasonable wager, is too old-left to have much affection for identity politics).

  23. What’s interesting is what the Democratic electorate finds appealing.

    Sleepy Joe is toast if the impeachment process reaches the senate. In the unlikely event he survives Trump’s impeachment trial, he may spontaneously self-destruct in any of a number of other ways, from past gaffes to new gaffes to sudden ocular bleeding; he’s egg-like in his fragility and I doubt the progs will choose him.

    I think Bernie will ultimately come up short as well. A significant portion of Bernie’s base resents him for giving in to and *endorsing* Hillary after the bought-and-paid-for superdelegates knifed him in the back in 2016. He rolled over for Hillary. He’s old and weak.

    Plus, neither of these old white men are intersectional enough.

    Mayor Pete gets one intersectional brownie button for being funny. But apparently the blacks hate him. Regardless, Bootie-gig is toast as soon as he kisses his husband in public. I expect the other top-tier dem candidates to start making appearances with their spouses to precipitate his downfall.

    Lieawatha is the most intersectional of the top-tier candidates still standing. Her Medicare-for-all plan is a PR disaster, not going to be easy to film-flam her way out of that one; but she *did* get past the cultural appropriation hurdle (thus far). Trump did his best to make of her a laughing stock and she willed herself past the mockery to become a legitimate contender (thus far). I give her credit for moxy and I believe she’s the smartest of the bunch.

    Then there’s Hillary. She’s a fucking bottle of ipecac. The prog movement will be at death’s door before they consider imbibing that shit again. But a man can dream…

    Trump humiliating Hillary back in 2016 was super funny. A second win over her would be even funnier.

  25. Mentus–In any sane world, Warren’s flat out lying, and claiming that she did not receive any benefit from falsely claiming to be an American Indian–and repeatedly trying, furthermore, to sell voters on her claim of no benefits received–should totally disqualify her from being a candidate for President.*

    She apparently believes that voters are stupid or that, in the age of “Orangeman bad,” Democrat voters will be willing to just ignore such a major lie, and indicator of untrustworthiness.

    See https://pjmedia.com/election/warren-denies-receiving-any-benefit-as-a-result-of-native-american-lie/

  27. “…apparently believes…”

    Absolutely. From the very depths of her private, state-of-the-art, sweltering, smoked-up sweat lodge.

    The firmly-held belief (backed up by a non-stop avalanche of demonization) has always been “Anyone is better than Trump”; and so it only makes sense that the Democrats have firmly decided to give the voters…”Anyone”.

    With great fanfare, excitement and enthusiasm….

    At least initially.

    Because now that they’ve taken a step back (as it were), they’ve discovered that more than a few (read practically “all”) of these “Anyones” are pretty pathetic (though each in their own inimitable way)—no, make that execrable—no matter how you cut it.

    So that while “Anyone is better than Trump” is still the official company credo (along with such boilerplate as “supporters of the person in the street” and “supporters of human rights” and “supporters of justice” and “American Psychos”, sorry “Patriots”), they are desperate to find a candidate that will attract more than mere puzzlement, discontented grumbling or shrieks of laughter (or agony).

    It’s not coming easy….

    …Hence impeachment—that all-purpose tool for all seasons and needs.

    Hence any possible lifeline that their necessarily selective interpretation of Horowitz’s report might offer.

    (While Hillary checks her looking glass with ever increasing frequency…and preens…and dreams….)

  28. “The IG report might have falsely claimed that there was no evidence of political bias in the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, but it found that all of Devin Nunes’ claims about lies told to secure the FISA warrant were true, and all of Adam Schiff’s counter-claims were false:
    …
    Exit Question:

    Do David French, Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, and the rest of the gang finally start treating claims of Dan Jones, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, Adam Schiff and John Brennan with some skepticism, given their track history of remorseless lies?

    And if they don’t begin to offer the most minimal level of skepticism towards the claims made by proven liars — what conclusions can we begin to draw about this group?” – Ace (h/t Art Deco)

    Maybe not in the opening (see Turley’s Titanic analogy), but certainly in the subsequent investigation. Like, about 1 nanosecond after the permission to proceed was given. Kind of like the Big Bang.

    Everyone but the “cruise ship conservatives” (A.D.) knew where the ship was headed from the beginning.

    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/12/horowitzs-findings-belie-his-conclusion-of-no-political-motivation.php

    As Sen. Lindsey Graham said today [12/09], whatever one concludes about whether the Justice Department had sufficient grounds to go to the FISA court initially, it’s clear that the DOJ acted dishonestly in failing thereafter to apprise that court of the problems it discovered with the Steele report. Graham said he considers this failure to be a crime.

    Horowitz did not find that politics motivated the opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. But given the large number of improper acts (and failures to act) that occurred thereafter, many of them egregious, and given the words of some of those who committed them — e.g. “Viva la Resistance!” — it seems clear that politics motivated the way the investigation proceeded. And if that’s true, it’s reasonable to believe that politics were involved from the inception.

  29. http://ace.mu.nu/archives/384700.php

    December 10, 2019
    AG Barr Blasts Media and Deep Staters — and Criticizes Horowitz — in Interview
    This was an amazing statement from Barr.
    …

    Horowitz was critical of the FBI for their practices in using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to get a warrant to conduct surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, but he concluded that the investigation itself was launched properly, without evidence of political bias.

    “It’s hard to look at this stuff and not think that it was a gross abuse,” Barr said during a discussion Tuesday at a Wall Street Journal CEO Council forum in Washington. He referred to the investigation as a whole as a “travesty.”

    “Where I disagree with Mike, I just think this was very flimsy,” he said about the basis for the investigation. The FBI cited comments by Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos to an Australian official as sparking concerns about the campaign’s possible involvement with Russia. Barr dismissed this as “a comment made by a 28-year-old volunteer on a campaign in a bar.”

    He also said, in an earlier interview with NBC, that he suspected the entire fake investigation was launched “in bad faith.”

    “I think our nation was turned on its head for three years based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by a completely irresponsible press,” Barr said. “I think there were gross abuses …and inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI.”
    “I think that leaves open the possibility that there was bad faith.”

    In the Wall Street Journal interview, Barr also emphasized that Horowitz did not exonerate the Deep State at all; he merely found no documentary or testimonial evidence of an admission of bad faith or political bias. In other words, while the circumstances scream bad faith, no one admitted it in an interview and no one was foolish enough to write an email saying “We are mounting this investigation for purely political reasons, YOLO!”

    Barr notes that that’s all the IG can do — he can’t “draw conclusions,” as Barr and Durham can, but can only report the verified facts he discovered.

    And if — without the fear of prosecution, and some taking deals to turn on the higher-ups — none of the conspirators straight-up admitted the conspiracy to Horowitz, Horowitz was required to say “No evidence found.”

    But Barr emphasized: Barr or Durham are not so limited.

  30. A better question is why, knowing Horowitz would soft-pedal everything in favor of the FBI (because he did it before) did Barr not intervene like he did in the Meuller report to make sure the real message got out?

    Barr needs to put down the bagpipes and pick up his .45 sidearm, and start acting like a sheriff.

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