The most important detail here is that Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, is the one who will conduct the inquiry. It won’t be Rosenstein. It won’t be Wray. It won’t be anyone with a vested interested in covering up what happened, or whether a certain former high-ranking official who now makes TV for Netflix might have improperly ordered any of this to happen for political purposes.
Remember, Rosenstein and Wray are Obama holdovers. Their party registrations (and I don’t even know what they are) are irrelevant. If Obama ordered them to abuse the power of law enforcement in order to stop Trump from winning, and they did it, they have a vested interest in hiding that fact and in protecting Obama’s involvement from exposure.
Horowitz doesn’t.
I would ask why this took a personal meeting with the president of the United States to get started, but I guess that’s obvious. He is their boss, after all, and the constitutional authority to direct federal law enforcement belongs to him and him along. I’m not really sure why an “agreement” needed to be reached. Unless Trump doesn’t realize he can give them directives. I suppose the reality is that he can do that only so long as they don’t decide to defy him to fire them, because he knows we’ll hear all the screaming about a “constitutional crisis” if he does.
Yet they’re going to do it, probably because they realize how bad this already looks, and that it would look even worse for them if they came up with some flimsy excuse not to look into it.
So here we go:
Trump said in a Twitter post on Sunday that he would demand the Justice Department look into whether the FBI “infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”
Hours later, a spokeswoman said the department asked its inspector general to expand a review of the process for requesting surveillance warrants to include determining whether there was impropriety or political motivation in how the FBI conducted its investigation.The FBI was looking into Trump election campaign ties to Moscow before Special Counsel Robert Mueller took over the probe a year ago.
“If anyone did infiltrate or surveil participants in a presidential campaign for inappropriate purposes, we need to know about it and take appropriate action,” Rosenstein said in a statement on Sunday evening.
Democrats said Mueller and his investigation should be protected and information, such as about any informant, should not be shared with Congress.
This is how Democrats hope to justify covering this up: Anything that’s being kept secret is for the protection of the Mueller investigation. The Mueller investigation is sacrosanct. Therefore, everything that’s now secret must remain secret – even from Congress (in fact, as long as Republicans are in control, especially from Congress) – because anything that’s revealed will destroy Mueller’s work, which is the most important thing in the world.
That’s ridiculous.
For one thing, Mueller is supposed to be looking into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. If it turns out the Obama Administration used the FBI to plant a mole in the Trump campaign, that would be an indication that the whole Russia thing was nothing more than a political concoction by Team Obama. If Mueller hasn’t figured that out by now, then it’s time a few secrets were revealed so he can get it straight.
Bigger picture, it’s ridiculous because so far everything Democrats have wanted kept in the dark – ostensibly to protect “sources and methods” or whatever – has caused only one problem upon its airing: It’s embarrassed the DOJ, the FBI, the Democrats and their media protectors, while casting doubt on the legitimacy of this entire investigation.
Horowitz will do a good job. The only question is whether his superiors at the DOJ will insist on withholding or redacting details that would tell us what really happened, and who was involved with it. Then again, President Trump has the authority to declassify anything he wants.
Maybe someone should explain that to him.
The most important detail here is that Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, is the one who will conduct the inquiry. It won’t be Rosenstein. It won’t be Wray. It won’t be anyone with a vested interested in covering up what happened, or whether a certain former high-ranking official who now makes TV for Netflix might have improperly ordered any of this to happen for political purposes.
