Dot-Connection Time: The Inspector General's Report on FBI and DOJ is out.

If you can keep track of the various threads and directions of inquiry in this investigation, you are a better conspiracy theorist than I am. But here's the link, and here are a few sites with good advance preparation:

https://www.justice.gov/file/1071991/download

https://themarketswork.com/

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/

https://disobedientmedia.com/

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Amanda Matthews's picture

ANYONE connected to the federal government to get straight to the point on anything.

EDIT: I haven’t gotten far but this stupid thing reminds me of the non-informative bullshit CYA styles and conclusions of

1) The Warren Commission
2) The 911 Panel clusterfuck run by Nebraska’s very own war criminal, Bob Kerrey
3) Senate Report on Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq

I could be wrong, in which case I’ll be shocked all the way to Hell and back.

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

Amanda Matthews's picture

@Amanda Matthews @Amanda Matthews

bottom of Page ii:)

The question we considered was not whether a particular investigative decision was the ideal choice or one that could have been handled more effectively, but whether the circumstances surrounding the decision indicated that it was based on considerations other than the merits of the investigation. If a choice made by the investigative team was among two or more reasonable alternatives, we did not find that it was improper even if we believed that an alternative decision would have been more effective.

Now that’s some world-class CYA. What, exactly, is their criteria for “...based on considerations other than the merits of the investigation.”

Also...

Thus, a determination by the OIG that a decision was not unreasonable does not mean that the OIG has endorsed the decision or concluded that the decision was the most effective among the options considered. We took this approach because our role as an OIG is not to second-guess valid discretionary judgments made during the course of an investigation, and this approach is consistent with the OIG’s handling of such questions in past reviews.

What the hell was the investigation for then??? Who determined what was ‘valid’.

EDIT: added everything from “Thus a determination...”

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

@Amanda Matthews

observations are not only valid but very well stated. But the researcher at https://themarketswork.com/, Jeff Carlson, who is such a great writer and investigator of this subject, has said so far,

"The Executive Summary & Conclusions are disheartening.

However, at first blush, the body of the Report is a different matter.

I would encourage a withholding of judgement for the time being. We are at the beginning stages."

I can no longer access his site on my computer, just my phone, so I can't quote him easily at length, but I recommend reading for background at his site.

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Amanda Matthews's picture

@Linda Wood

Creature of any wrong doing in regard to her email/server usage and the two years of lies that went along with it.

Another waste of taxpayer money.

As described in Chapter Seven of our report, the prosecutors concluded that the evidence did not support prosecution under any of these statutes for various reasons, including that former Secretary Clinton and her senior aides lacked the intent to communicate classified information on unclassified systems. Critical to their conclusion was that the emails in question lacked proper classification markings, that the senders often refrained from using specific classified facts or terms in emails and worded emails carefully in an attempt to “talk around” classified information, that the emails were sent to other government officials in furtherance of their official duties, and that former Secretary Clinton relied on the judgment of State Department employees to properly handle classified information, among other facts.

We further found that the statute that required the most complex analysis by the prosecutors was Section 793(f)(1), the “gross negligence” provision that has been the focus of much of the criticism of the declination decision. As we describe in Chapters Two and Seven of our report, the prosecutors analyzed the legislative history of Section 793(f)(1), relevant case law, and the Department’s prior interpretation of the statute. They concluded that Section 793(f)(1) likely required a state of mind that was “so gross as to almost suggest deliberate intention,” criminally reckless, or “something that falls just short of being willful,” as well as evidence that the individuals who sent emails containing classified information “knowingly” included or transferred such information onto unclassified systems.

The Midyear team concluded that such proof was lacking. We found that this interpretation of Section 793(f)(1) was consistent with the Department’s historical approach in prior cases under different leadership, including in the 2008 decision not to prosecute former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for mishandling classified documents.

We analyzed the Department’s declination decision according to the same analytical standard that we applied to other decisions made during the investigation. We did not substitute the OIG’s judgment for the judgments made by the Department, but rather sought to determine whether the decision was based on improper considerations, including political bias. We found no evidence that the conclusions by the prosecutors were affected by bias or other improper considerations; rather, we determined that they were based on the prosecutors’ assessment of the facts, the law, and past Department practice.

We therefore concluded that these were legal and policy judgments involving core prosecutorial discretion that were for the Department to make.

That is on pages vi an vii.

Pfffft. That sleazy wench is about as innocent as I am rich. And I’m basically bankrupt.

Oh, and Strzok & Page had no agenda either. They were just texting their ‘opinions’.

In particular, we were concerned about text messages exchanged by FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, Special Counsel to the Deputy Director, that potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions were impacted by bias or improper considerations. As we describe in Chapter Twelve of our report, most of the text messages raising such questions pertained to the Russia investigation, which was not a part of this review. Nonetheless, the suggestion in certain Russia- related text messages in August 2016 that Strzok might be willing to take official action to impact presidential candidate Trump’s electoral prospects caused us to question the earlier Midyear investigative decisions in which Strzok was involved, and whether he took specific actions in the Midyear investigation based on his political views. As we describe Chapter Five of our report, we found that Strzok was not the sole decisionmaker for any of the specific Midyear investigative decisions we examined in that chapter. We further found evidence that in some instances Strzok and Page advocated for more aggressive investigative measures in the Midyear investigation, We further found evidence that in some instances Strzok and Page advocated for more aggressive investigative measures in the Midyear investigation,

There were clearly tensions and disagreements in a number of important areas between Midyear agents and prosecutors. However, we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed in Chapter Five, or that the justifications offered for these decisions were pretextual.

Nonetheless, these messages cast a cloud over the FBI’s handling of the Midyear investigation and the investigation’s credibility. But our review did not find evidence to connect the political views expressed in these messages to the specific investigative decisions that we reviewed; rather, consistent with the analytic approach described above, we found that these specific decisions were the result of discretionary judgments made during the course of an investigation by the Midyear agents and prosecutors and that these judgment calls were not unreasonable. The broader impact of these text and instant messages, including on such matters as the public perception of the FBI and the Midyear investigation, are discussed in Chapter Twelve of our report.

Even the low-hanging fruit that texted about an ‘insurance policy’ and discussions in “Andy’s office” get a pass. They’ve got their ‘sacrificial lamb’ in James Comey and I suspect that he’ll be adequately rewarded for his suffering at some point in time.

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

@Amanda Matthews

I can't argue with your reading of what I'm also reading, but I do think I have to read the whole document before I can make sense of it.

But so far, just having read part of the beginning, I find they're saying that, in the minds of Comey and the Justice Department, Clinton and her staff were a bunch of air-headed ditzes whose intentions couldn't possibly have been to enter into monetary deals with Eurasian frackers but could only have been examples of extreme carelessness and that therefore NO REASONABLE PERSON would want to interfere with the Ditz's chance to become President of the United States!

Pretty much what we already knew. But the more details the better, because the more we learn about this, the worse it gets. But I hear you, and I agree with what you're saying.

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WaterLily's picture

@Linda Wood But who the fuck cares? Everyone knows that people only read the executive summary and conclusion, especially when a document is 518 pages, so even if the rest of the report nails Her to the wall, public opinion will already firmly be entrenched in the "see? we told you Her was innocent!" camp.

What a fucking waste of time and money.

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@WaterLily

with what you're saying. The researcher I recommend, Jeff Carlson, who has worked so hard to establish timelines and to connect dots in this complex series of events, wrote yesterday that the Executive Summary was "disheartening."

But I have a feeling that the details, even in the summary, are going to bite. Conservative bloggers and journalists and even (I hope) members of Congress are not going to let this go. If the Inspector General is saying, yes, obviously we have a system that is corrupt, just as Alberto Gonzales was not brought to justice, James Comey will walk because that's the system we obviously have, if that's what they're saying, I think the American people will go, as Michael Flynn said we would go if we knew what forces we were supplying in Syria, ballistic.

Also, much of this dot-connecting has to do with the Russia fiasco, and I agree with Jeff Carlson that reading the details of the investigation is more important than hoping for an immediate arrest of the perps. Knowledge is power.

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but I can't resist taking a shot at Comey based on this, from the Executive Summary page viii,

https://www.justice.gov/file/1071991/download

… Comey said that he recalled first learning about the additional emails on the Weiner laptop at some point in early October 2016, although he said it was possible this could have occurred in late September 2016. Comey told the OIG that this information “didn’t index” with him, which he attributed to the way the information was presented to him and the fact that, “I don’t know that I knew that [Weiner] was married to Huma Abedin at the time.”

This is the kind of thing, no matter how this Report ends up incriminating Comey or not, that just makes one want to scream. Information that over 300,000 State Department emails were found on the laptop of a man suspected of sexual exploitation of a minor, “didn’t index” with him because he didn't know that Weiner was married to Huma Abedin at the time? Huh? If it was some other sexual predator of children, not one married to the mob, it wasn't that important? Somehow the emails floated over to some guy, hence, no big harm?

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Amanda Matthews's picture

@Linda Wood

He didn’t know Huma was married to The Weiner.

That guy was running the FBI?

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

snoopydawg's picture

@Amanda Matthews

was because the NYC attorney general's office was going to release the information that was on Weiner's laptop. They found some very hideous stuff on it and rumors are that Lynch threatened them to stay quiet or she would bring charges against the police officers who killed Eric Garner.

The information on it wasn't just the emails that Huma sent him. No, there was some very nasty stuff on it. Think Jeffrey Epstein territory.

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@Amanda Matthews @Amanda Matthews

airheads from way back, which is why they wound up in/'qualified for' so many essential, high-security positions; both the US 'intelligence' agencies and the Presidency, as two examples, must have this in their job descriptions. Oh, yeah, and be crazy blind-to-injustice as bats.

And doesn't that just explain a lot? See, not flagrant corruption at all, just the same lot of lunatics running the asylum and getting each other off and away with murder.

Edited after staring at a letter-typo for about two freaking minutes until 'sharethis' went through so I could wait again to fix it; dunno what that is, but it likes to torment me, lol.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Not Henry Kissinger's picture

@Linda Wood

is not the same as "I didn't know".

He knew.

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

going to be a 500-page thread, but from page ix,

https://www.justice.gov/file/1071991/download

As we describe in Chapter Nine of our report, the explanations we were given for the FBI’s failure to take immediate action on the Weiner laptop fell into four general categories:

• The FBI Midyear team was waiting for additional information about the contents of the laptop from NYO, which was not provided until late October;

• The FBI Midyear team could not review the emails without additional legal authority, such as consent or a new search warrant;

• The FBI Midyear team and senior FBI officials did not believe that the information on the laptop was likely to be significant; and

• Key members of the FBI Midyear team had been reassigned to the investigation of Russian interference in the U.S. election, which was a higher priority.

Tick tock... just a few days before the election... no reason to ruffle any feathers...

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snoopydawg's picture

the prosecutors concluded that the evidence did not support prosecution under any of these statutes for various reasons, including that former Secretary Clinton and her senior aides lacked the intent to communicate classified information on unclassified systems.

Umm, no they didn't lack any intention of using her private email server to send classified information on a non classified server! They DELIBERATELY used it so that she could hide what she was doing with her foundation because she had been told not to do it!

Oh yeah. And Bill didn't Intend to interfere with his wife's investigation when he saw the USAs head prosecutor on the tarmac. Nope. He just wanted to jaunt over and ask after her grandchildren and talk about his. Guess who is buying this?

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WaterLily's picture

@snoopydawg This may already have been said ... but just in case:

Never mind that "intent" was never supposed to be part of this! FFS!

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snoopydawg's picture

The Clinton-Lynch tarmac meeting
“It’s absolutely not true. I literally didn’t know she was there until somebody told me she was there. And we looked out the window and it was really close and all of her staff was unloading, so I thought she’s about to get off and I’ll just go shake hands with her when she gets off. I don’t want her to think I’m afraid to shake hands with her because she’s the Attorney General.”

That’s former President Bill Clinton explaining to the DOJ inspector general the backstory for the controversial June 2016 meeting he had on a Phoenix airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Democrats at the time bemoaned the poor optics of the meeting, and conservatives claimed it was evidence of collusion between the Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign. But Bill Clinton said he didn’t know Lynch was in Arizona until his staff pointed out their planes were parked near each other. And he denied news reports he’d delayed his own takeoff so he could speak with Lynch.

Hack attack

According to evidence we reviewed, the FBI also confirmed compromises to email accounts belonging to certain individuals who communicated with Clinton by email, such as Jake Sullivan and Sidney Blumenthal.

This passage adds a few specifics to a vague finding in the previous FBI summary of the Clinton case, in which the bureau said that “hostile foreign actors successfully gained access to the personal email accounts of individuals with whom Clinton was in regular contact.”

Sullivan, a top foreign policy aide to Clinton during the campaign, had previously told Capitol Hill investigators that his personal Gmail account was the subject of numerous hacking attempts in 2016. But it doesn’t appear that an actual intrusion was ever confirmed. The Blumenthal hack originally came out during the trial of Marcel Lehel Lazar, the Romanian hacker who first revealed that Clinton had used a private email address during her time as secretary of state. Lazar told authorities that he broke into the personal email accounts of dozens of American celebrities, business executives and political figures, including Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton aide.

source

My full comment

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snoopydawg's picture

IMG_2260_0.Jpeg

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Amanda Matthews's picture

@snoopydawg @snoopydawg

I had to give it up for a while. Even though it’s hot here I am surviving on fans because AC is too expensive and my windows are open. My neighbor was wondering if something was wrong because she kept hearig me swearing.

Our houses are pretty close so I hear everything her and her wife fight about when their eindows ate open.

EDIT: cleaned up some confusing verbiage.

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

@Amanda Matthews

enough from our neighbors on both sides that when I scream and yell at the top of my lungs, I don't think they can hear me, or if they can, they sort of know what I'm likely to be furious about. My husband's used to the occasional screaming when he knows I'm reading about the Deep State.

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snoopydawg's picture

@Amanda Matthews

that proves she Intentionally and willing broke the law . First by making the decision to use it knowing that it was an unsecured server.

2- she did send classified information through it and to people who were not authorized to read them because they didn't have security clearances to do so.

3-after she was told by the members of the Benghazi committee to turn over all of her emails she deleted 30,000 of them. "Mills stated that someone from the state department told her that she could delete Hillary's personal emails." Who did she speak with that said to do that? We don't know because she was not asked about it.

4- Somewhere between 400,000-600,000 emails between Hillary and Huma were found on Weiner's laptop and some of them were marked Classified. Right there is evidence of a crime because they knew that his laptop was not secure and that he did not have the security clearance to receive them.

5- Lynch told Comey not to call it an investigation, just a matter. We couldn't let a presidential nominee be under investigation during her run for it now could we?

6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and gawd knows how much more information will we see after further reading?

The report talks about the 3 other people who were charged and convicted for not securing their classified information. The more recent one was David Petrayous who not only kept classified information in a personal notebook that he left lying around unsecured so that anyone could read it, but he then gave it to his girlfriend to use in her book about him.

He was charged and found guilty. So he went to prison just like that sailor who took a few pictures of the inside of his submarine, right? Wrong. Petrayous was sentenced to 2 years probation and had to pay $100,000 fine!

This is how our justice system works in this country. The people who commit crimes that if normal people committed would be sentenced for decades in prison get special treatment because of their position in society.

Hillary should have been charged for intentionally using her private email server knowing that it wasn't legal and for using it to send and receive classified information. Even if she thought that the letter "C" meant that it was just a number of the alphabet. Yep. She said that.

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@snoopydawg

Because that what she does. She should have put that Russian hat on at Yale. It would have made a perfect clown hat.

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"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin

Amanda Matthews's picture

@snoopydawg

Mills or Abiden the email system she needed to have. Everything she (they) did was intended to avoid the FOIA rules and The Empty Suit’s decree that usage of the .gov system was mandatory. Which is a farking joke because TES did the same thing she did.

National Archive Administrator: Obama Records Missing

*

Despite this legislation the Obama administration, which claimed to be the most transparent in history, has been shown to destroy and disappear federal records. Thomas Lipscomb, writing at Real Clear Politics reports:

…the accumulation of recent congressional testimony has made it clear that the Obama administration itself engaged in the wholesale destruction and “loss” of tens of thousands of government records covered under the act as well as the intentional evasion of the government records recording system by engaging in private email exchanges. So far, former President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Lynch and several EPA officials have been named as offenders. The IRS suffered record “losses” as well. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy called it “an unauthorized private communications system for official business for the patent purpose of defeating federal record-keeping and disclosure laws.”

Clearly, America’s National Archives is facing the first major challenge to its historic role in preserving the records of the United States. What good is the National Archives administering a presidential library, like the planned Obama library in Chicago, if it is missing critical records of interest to scholars? And what’s to prevent evasion of the entire federal records system by subsequent administrations to suit current politics rather than serve scholars for centuries to come?

http://www.norcalblogs.com/postscripts/2018/06/10/national-archive-admin...

He is nothing but a self-serving liar and fraud. He knew what she was doing the entire time and that’s because of text messages sent between the two of them.

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

the Russia investigation, from page ix,

https://www.justice.gov/file/1071991/download

In assessing the decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the Midyear-related investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop, we were particularly concerned about text messages sent by Strzok and Page that potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions they made were impacted by bias or improper considerations. Most of the text messages raising such questions pertained to the Russia investigation, and the implication in some of these text messages, particularly Strzok’s August 8 text message (“we’ll stop” candidate Trump from being elected), was that Strzok might be willing to take official action to impact a presidential candidate’s electoral prospects. Under these circumstances, we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the Midyear-related investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop was free from bias.

… However, we also did not identify a consistent or persuasive explanation for the FBI’s failure to act for almost a month after learning of potential Midyear-related emails on the Weiner laptop.

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From page x,

https://www.justice.gov/file/1071991/download

Much like with his July 5 announcement, we found that in making this decision, Comey engaged in ad hoc decisionmaking based on his personal views even if it meant rejecting longstanding Department policy or practice. We found unpersuasive Comey’s explanation as to why transparency was more important than Department policy and practice with regard to the reactivated Midyear investigation while, by contrast, Department policy and practice were more important to follow with regard to the Clinton Foundation and Russia investigations.
Comey’s description of his choice as being between “two doors,” one labeled “speak” and one labeled “conceal,” was a false dichotomy. The two doors were actually labeled “follow policy/practice” and “depart from policy/practice.” Although we acknowledge that Comey faced a difficult situation with unattractive choices, in proceeding as he did, we concluded that Comey made a serious error of judgment.

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Amanda Matthews's picture

6 takeaways from the Justice watchdog report on the Clinton email investigation

Report defends Clinton

The inspector general's report Thursday solidified that Clinton had not intended to break the law with her handling of classified material on her private email, by exhaustively detailing the steps of the investigation.

Despite other issues with Comey, the IG signs off on his ultimate conclusion that Clinton should not be charged.

For a full year before the 2016 election, investigators realized they had little evidence in the case against Clinton. But they discussed for months how to end the investigation and communicate that with the public.

Comey found solace in the report's conclusions that the Clinton probe was not biased.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/06/14/politics/takeaways-ig-report-comey-fb...

6566E9BB-7F62-49A3-A5C4-A7E37CD53B83.jpeg

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I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa

WaterLily's picture

And now we can fully return to RUSSIA!!!1111!! Eleventy!!!

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