The Horowitz and Wray Show Comes to Capitol Hill

Happy Father’s Day! – Pretending to suddenly be concerned about the children of illegal aliens who have illegally crossed into the United States, social justice warriors took to social media on Saturday in outrage that many Americans would be celebrating Father’s day on Sunday. I celebrated Father’s Day with my family anyway, and even worse, cooked delicious, juicy animal meat in the form of beef and chicken fajitas for my wifey, children and grandchildren to consume. They loved me for it. So there.

San Fran Nan is outraged, too. – Doddering old Nancy Pelosi, who after a lifetime of supposed “public service” can somehow afford to live in a multi-million dollar home protected by a wall in one of the priciest neighborhoods in San Francisco, and who owns several other homes to boot, attacked “people of faith” on Sunday for not caring about the plight of illegal aliens. You can be sure that Ms. Pelosi, who claims to be a practicing Catholic, won’t be selling any of her homes to raise money to support these immigrants, or tear down her property’s wall to set a good example for the rest of the country. Because, well, liberals.

Big Drama coming this week on multiple fronts. – Today and tomorrow, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz and FBI Director Christopher Wray will go to capitol hill to offer testimony about the report he released last Thursday on the FBI’s fake investigation into the Clinton email scandal during 2016. Horowitz and Wray will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee today and before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

We can expect Director Wray to deflect, dissemble, refuse to answer based on false claims of “protecting sources” or other classic dodges used by FBI Directors in such situations, because he has clearly demonstrated he is just another feckless bureaucrat whose main goal is not the revelation of the truth, but the covering of his and his utterly corrupt department’s ass. That’s what we saw from him in his god-awful press conference last Thursday following the report’s release, and there is no reason whatsoever to expect anything different from him today or tomorrow.

Horowitz, however, is a different matter entirely. Unlike Wray, he is not a guy with a history of obfuscating and deflecting in this kind of setting. In his past testimonies to congress he has pretty much always been blunt and clear in answering questions posed to him.

What will be interesting to see with Horowitz will be to observe whether he bases his testimony on what was written – most likely by Wray, Rod Rosenstein and others – in the Executive Summary to his report, or if he bases his testimony on what is contained in the actual body of the report. Because while the Executive Summary claims his report finds “no documentary evidence” that political bias influenced the fake investigation, the body of the report details all manner of not just bias, but outright hostility towards Donald Trump influencing pretty much every decision made in the conduct of what really amounted to a cover-up operation favoring the Pantsuit Princess.

And where the Executive Summary to the report claims to have revealed no criminal wrongdoing on the part of anyone at the FBI, the body of the report details all sorts of criminal actions, including the taking of bribes and leaking of classified information on the part of multiple bad actors within the FBI. Thus, which part of the report Horowitz chooses to reference in his answers to questions from Republican members of these committees – the Democrat members will all just do what they can to continue to support the cover-up – will be key. Horowitz has a history of trying to do the right thing in the face of obstruction and blow-back from his superiors within DOJ. We can only hope that continues to be the case.

The other bit of drama we may finally, at long last see this week will be some real pushback from the GOP leadership in the House of Representatives over the DOJ’s and FBI’s ongoing refusal to comply with perfectly valid and legal requests by several committees for documents. Speaker Paul Ryan is finally personally engaging in the controversy, having attended a Friday night meeting in which he, Devin Nunes, Trey Gowdy and Bob Goodlatte (chairmen of House Oversight, Intelligence and Judiciary committees, respectively) met with Wray and Rosenstien to hammer out a final deal on provision of said documents.

The group is supposed to meet again today, after which DOJ supposedly has promised compliance of some sort. Nunes and Gowdy were both very plain-spoken in media interviews on the matter Sunday:

From Nunes: “My patience has run out. I believe that they have leaked — they created massive leaks. We know that from the I.G. Report. Inspector Horowitz showed us these major, major gaffes…here’s the bottom line. Mr. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, and Director Wray have to decide whether or not they want to be part of the cleanup crew or they want to be part of the cover-up crew. That’s really the decision that they have to make for themselves here. The best way they can be part of the cleanup of this mess is give us all the documents this week, so that we can put this behind us and let the American people begin to heal.”

From Gowdy: “Paul Ryan led this meeting… And Paul made it very clear; there’s going to be action on the floor of the House this week if the FBI and DOJ do not comply with our subpoena request. So Rod Rosenstein, Chris Wray you were in the meeting, you understood him just as clearly as I did. We’re going to get compliance or the House of Representatives is going to use its full arsenal of constitutional weapons to gain compliance.”

This all, of course, comes on the heels of a very rancorous meeting between most of these same principles last week, during which the perpetually oily and abusive Rosenstein actually threatened to subpoena the phone and email records of the members of congress and their staff in retaliation for conducting their constitutional oversight duties. So it’s pretty easy to see why everyone’s nerves would be on end over this situation.

Of course, the problem these committee chairmen have is that congress’s power in this situation is fairly limited. Our constitutional balance of powers envision that patriotic, competent and loyal people will be appointed to these high positions within the Department of Justice. We know today that that was definitely not what happened in the Barack Obama Administration, and the jury is just barely still out on Wray, Rosenstein and Jeff Sessions. Based on that assumption of good faith, the founding fathers did not give congress many powers to effectively combat a corrupted DOJ.

About the worst congress could do in this situation would be to initiate impeachment proceedings against Rosenstein and Wray, something Nunes and Goodlatte have threatened to do in the past. But if these guys are corrupt enough to engage in this stonewalling operation for over a year now, and they know that there is not a single Senate Democrat honest enough to vote to remove them from office, what do they care?

So there will be drama, because we can be sure DOJ and the FBI are not going to comply with these latest congressional demands, but at the end of the day it will almost certainly end up being a lot of sound and fury that ends up signifying nothing.

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

General Horowitz, were these words that you wrote in your report or were these words written by others who edited your report?

Once you completed your report which official did you submit it to?

I believe everyone mentioned in the report got to submit “corrections”.

I've read/heard that as well. What I don't know, and wish I did, was whether those corrections are mandatory for Horowitz to accept, or are negotiated. In other words, how much change can/did occur?

https://www.c-span.org/video/?446804-1/doj-inspector-general-fbi-director-testify-clinton-email-probe-report

JUNE 18, 2018

Justice Department OIG Report on Clinton Email Probe

The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, and FBI Director Christopher Wray testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe in the run-up to the 2016 election.

Airing LIVE Monday, Jun 18 2:00pm EDT on C-SPAN

I believe everyone mentioned in the report got to submit “corrections”.

The practice should be changed to how the Supreme Court (and lower court panels) issues their rulings. A majority opinion, and a minority opinion.

Let the IG write his report, and allow those who wish to submit their own dissenting opinion.

But it's lunacy to allow the subjects of the report to submit edits, and it is lunacy to allow the DOJ directors to edit the report.

It completely undermines the supposed independence of the Office of Inspector General.

About the worst congress could do in this situation would be to initiate impeachment proceedings against Rosenstein and Wray, something Nunes and Goodlatte have threatened to do in the past. But if these guys are corrupt enough to engage in this stonewalling operation for over a year now, and they know that there is not a single Senate Democrat honest enough to vote to remove them from office, what do they care?

There actually is another option. The House could demand action from President Trump to declassify the information necessary to get to the bottom of things. You will say, “‘Demand' is strong language, what could the House do to force Mr. Trump to comply?”
The answer is simple - Ryan could threaten to bring a vote of impeachment of the president if he fails to comply. No Democrat could oppose that; how could they explain it to their rabid base??? It would be Catch-22 for the Democrats.
President Trump has certainly has no motive to resist that demand, it throws him into the briar patch. And so the floodgates open. But it’s not Trump’s fault, Congress required it of him.

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