What the IG Report Is All About

The IG report by the DOJ was just released and it relates to all that is happening in Washington DC in recent years. I will outline the pieces and how they relate to the whole. The bottom line is our government is broken. We can’t seem to do the basics anymore. Either by choice or not, our government is not functioning as it should.

- June 2018

Why was this report under taken in the first place? That is the first question anyone should ask. We have an FBI and we have Congress which acts as oversight into these various federal agencies. Part of their job is to watch over these non elected officials and make sure rules are followed. In recent years, politics has played a big part of these congressional oversight hearings. It became more of a show than investigation. These hearings were used as attacks by one party on another and did little to resolve any problems or issues.

The Inspector General or IG office is given the responsibility of internal investigation. It is supposed to be an independent non-partisan investigative body and report on facts found related to this case. However, it is run by a government official.

The report is over 500 pages and very detailed. It also has a summary which is another political colored piece of work.

It has been described by some in the media as an uncanny symmetry to the original Comey news conference back in July of 2016. It outlined all the misdeeds that was committed by FBI officials close to the investigation of the Hillary email server matter and the Trump Russian collusion investigation but in the end came to the conclusion that no bias was detected and that no crimInal charges will be forthcoming...

It was a total white wash of these matters and the American public is left scratching their heads and ask what the heck just happened?

It appears people in power in DC always protect their own turf. Justice is not served.

Why was this investigation and report necessary? It is to demonstrate that the people in charge still call the shots. They needed to clear the air and act like adults and yet no consequences were the result.

Here is what we are told. An FBI agent can lie to Congress, leak information to the media, accept gifts from the media and violate their own policies and manipulate an investigation to predetermine the outcome even before all evidence and testimony are gathered...and they are perfectly fine. The summary report concluded -

“We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions.”

This is unbelievable. We are asked to believe that if they could not find a written confession of a crime, there is no case.

No criminal case in the history of our nation has this as the standard of proof.

After the report was released, the current FBI Director Christopher Wray announced that they will conduct training of all employees to deal with bias in the work place. Really? Is this the right course of action? Does the alleged crime of a few top officials automatically translate into assumed behavior of the rank and file FBI agents?

Instead of punishing the guilty, we are asked to punish the whole.

Here is what he said...

As you know, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released its report today on DOJ and FBI activities in the run-up to the 2016 election. I want to say up front that I appreciate the IG’s work in conducting this important review.

I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about the report, and then I’ll answer your questions.

The FBI’s mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. To carry out that mission, we’re entrusted with a lot of authority, so our actions are subject to close oversight—from the courts, from our elected leaders, and from independent entities like the inspector general. That’s how it should be. That examination—that oversight—makes the FBI stronger as an organization. It makes the public more safe.

With that in mind, let me briefly address the findings of the inspector general’s report.

I take this report very seriously, and we accept its findings and recommendations. It’s also important to note what the inspector general did not find. The report did not find any evidence of political bias or improper consideration actually impacting the investigation under review. But the report does identify errors of judgment, violations of or disregard for policy, and decisions that, at the very least, in hindsight, were not the best choices.

We’ve already started taking the necessary steps to address those issues.

First: We’re going to hold employees accountable for any potential misconduct.

We’ve already referred conduct highlighted in the IG report to OPR, the FBI’s independent Office of Professional Responsibility. We need to hold ourselves accountable for the work we do and the choices we make. And we’re doing that, fairly but without delay, in the way people should expect. We’re going to adhere to the appropriate disciplinary process for those reviews, and once that process is complete, we won’t hesitate to hold people accountable for their actions.

Second: We’re going to make sure that every FBI employee understands the lessons of this report.

Because change starts at the top—including right here with me—we’re going to begin by requiring all our senior executives, from around the world, to convene for in-depth training on the lessons we should learn from today’s report. Then we’re going to train every single FBI employee—new hires and veterans alike—on what went wrong, so those mistakes will never be repeated.

Third: We’re going to make sure we have the policies, procedures, and training needed for everyone to understand and remember what’s expected of us.

That includes:

• Drilling home the importance of objectivity—and of avoiding even the appearance of personal conflicts or political bias in our work;
• Ensuring that recusals are handled correctly and effectively—and are clearly communicated to the appropriate people;
• Making all employees fully aware of our new policy on contacts with the news media, which I issued last November—and making clear that we will not tolerate non-compliance;
• Ensuring that we follow all DOJ policies about public statements on ongoing investigations and uncharged conduct; and
• Ensuring that our employees adhere strictly to all policies and procedures on the use of FBI systems, networks, and devices.

I’ve also directed our associate deputy director to lead a review of how the FBI handles particularly sensitive investigations, and to make recommendations on how those should be staffed, structured, and supervised in the future—so that every sensitive investigation is conducted to the FBI’s highest standards.

And we’ll continue to work with the department to gauge our progress in all these areas.

The OIG report makes clear that we’ve got some work to do. But let’s also be clear on the scope of this report. It’s focused on a specific set of events back in 2016, and a small number of FBI employees connected with those events. Nothing in the report impugns the integrity of our workforce as a whole, or the FBI as an institution.

Instead of all that...why not just do your job?

The mass majority of the FBI are great patriots. They understand our laws and work each day to enforce them and defend our country. They don’t need training. It should be second nature by now. It is the crime of a few at the top that needs to be corrected.

Mr. Comey, no one in the public is blaming the rank and file members of the FBI. You can Be assured that their reputation is safe. It is your office and some senior staff that was the problem. You politicized your office and made decisions based on your politics rather than the law.

The Clinton Email scandal was a crime and you chose to ignore the obvious “intent” to avoid FOIA as her motive for setting up a private server and email address.

You have single handed change all future cases involving miss handling of government secrets. There will be the “Hillary defense” saying I did not intend to break our laws... and all is forgiven.

If anyone has brought shame to the FBI, it was you and your subordinates who have a disdain for half of the American voters. You thought you know better and acted to change the course of history and in the process did change the course of history. To this day, even after the year long investigation into Russian collusion, where nothing was found, you still adhere to your belief that Trump was the problem. That is bias by any definition. The IG report was white washed to protect the institution you were appointed to serve. The problem was not the American voter or the Trump supporters but the political process that brought about the Clinon machine which was all encompassing that touched the FBI, the DOJ and Congress...and the media. Time will tell If I was right or wrong.

The most disturbing part of all this is how clueless the Congress is. They are supposed to be oversight into these various agencies. They were lied to and they seemed to be OK with it. In the name of national security, the NSA the DOJ and the FBI have an open reign on activities and some were criminal to say the least. The problem is systemic. We need to clean house and drain the swamp. The swamp includes Congress, the head of the various alphabet agencies and the media. These media folks, instead of being the watchdog are colluding with one party to screw the America people. The media is dead.

This report is a clear demonstration why our government no longer works. They can’t seems to handle anything any more. When everything is politicized, nothing is true any more. There is no right and wrong. There is just spin to gain an advantage.

As an IT professional, I have a pretty good understanding of how emails work.

If the FBI was really interested in getting to the bottom of the Clinton email problem, it can be solved in a short period of time. The NSA has access to all email communications of Americans. They have copied and backups...

Even the emails deleted on the Clinton private servers, can be recovered. Every email has a sender and a host server and a receiver and a receiver host server. That is at minimum 4 copies. Even if Clinton deleted her copy and her private server host, the emails still exist on the other two sources and possibly backup servers on the cloud.

Let me put it this way, if Mrs. Clinton was a potential terrorist, you can bet all those emails would be recovered and all the text indexed and made searchable by keywords.

The question of whether confidential documents existed on her emails is easily resolved. Why did they allow her months to scrutinize her contents and delete those supposedly private communications? It was totally not needed. They could have gotten all the emails and sifted through them is a few days instead of the delay tactic they used...

As a side issue, the same applied to Lois Lerner at the IRS. Her computer was supposedly damaged and the email lost... how convenient. Except, no emails are ever lost. Not in private servers and not in government servers. These systems were designed to keep everything. On my own email of gmail, even when I delete an email message, it still resides in the delete folder and can be recovered anytime.

For the FBI to take the position they took on the Clinton email is just hard to swallow. Either they are totally incompetent technically, or they choose to be ignorant and deceive the American public. Either way, they were not doing their job.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that her decision to use a private email account and server for government business while secretary of state was “allowed” by the State Department. She has said “my predecessors did the same thing,” and insisted she “fully complied with every rule” in preserving her work emails.

We have taken issue with those claims, and now so does the State Department Office of Inspector General, which issued a report on May 26 that contradicts several of Clinton’s claims about her emails:

• The IG report cited department policies dating to 2005 that require “normal day-to-day operations” to be conducted on government servers, contrary to Clinton’s claim that her server was allowed. It also said she “had an obligation” to discuss her email system with cybersecurity officials, but there’s “no evidence” that she sought or received their approval.
• The IG report said Clinton should have turned over her emails before she left office — not 21 months after she left. “[S]he did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act,” the report said.
• Clinton has said her emails “were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department” because she emailed department officials at their government accounts. The IG report said that is “not an appropriate method of preserving any such emails that would constitute a Federal record.”

The IG report also said the only other secretary of state to use personal email “exclusively” for government business was Colin Powell, contrary to Clinton’s claim that her “predecessors” — plural — “did the same thing.” The IG also said that, like Clinton, Powell did not comply with policies on preserving work-related emails.

But the IG report said the comparison to Powell — who did not use a private server — only goes so far. It said during Clinton’s tenure, the rules governing personal email and the use of nongovernment systems were “considerably more detailed and more sophisticated,” citing specific memos that warned department employees about the security risks of not using the government system.

“Secretary Clinton’s cybersecurity practices accordingly must be evaluated in light of these more comprehensive directives,” the report said.

Brian Fallon, a Clinton campaign spokesman, told us that even though the IG report contradicts Clinton’s past statements, that “doesn’t make her statements untruthful.” He said Clinton, who declined to be interviewed by the inspector general’s staff, “believed — past tense” that her use of a private server was allowed, that it was no different than Powell using a commercial email account to conduct government business. She no longer believes that, he said, although she continues to say — as she did in an ABC News interview on May 26 after the IG report came out — that the use of personal email was allowed.

“It did not occur to her that having it on a personal server could be so distinct that it would be unapproved,” Fallon said. “We’re not intending to say post the IG report that her server was allowed. We don’t contest that. We’re saying … the use of personal email was widespread.”

Really?

Do we really need an IG report to conclude that she violated procedure and avoided FOIA by creating a home grown server unsecured in her basement?

Why did it take 2 years to reach this conclusion?

Why was this buried in 500+ pages of details...? Where I come from, this is called a snow job.

Regardless which side of the political spectrum you are from, can we agree this whole IG report about what transpired over the past year is very bad optics? It is damaging to our republic and it sets a very bad precedence going forward. As a conservative, I want an honest government. One that is voted by the people and one that follows our Constitution.

We can survive a bad apple here and there and we can even survive an incompetent President for 4 or 8 years. We cannot survive a systemic corrupt agency such as the DOJ or the FBI of the CIA. These agencies are there to maintain law and order. They are not suppose to be influenced by politics.