Michael Horowitz the Inspector General for the Department of Justice has kept the possibility of political bias in the FBI investigation into the campaign of President Donald Trump alive.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who heads the Senate Homeland Security Committee, asked Horowitz about his investigation into the FBI’s FISA applications to surveil President Trump’s aid Carter Page.
The senator said that Horowitz did not find political bias from former FBI assistant director of counterintelligence Bill Priestap when he opened the investigation.
But, he said, Horowitz did find political bias in his yearlong investigation of what the FBI and its leadership and agents did.
“We found through the text messages evidence of people’s political bias, correct,” Horowitz said to the panel of Senators.
“I think the scope here is what really alarms me,” Sen. Josh Hawley said. “The number of people involved directly involved at the FBI, the repeated decisions to mislead, outright lie to the FISA court, and the total implausibility that the explanations these people offered you, again, maybe they’re incompetent or maybe they had an agenda here.”
“Was it your conclusion that political bias did not affect any part of the Page investigation, any part of Crossfire Hurricane?” he said.
“We did not reach that conclusion,” the inspector general said. “We have been very careful in connection with the FISA for the reasons you mentioned to not reach that conclusion.
“In part, as we’ve talked about earlier: the alteration of the email, the text messages associated with the individual who did that, and then our inability to explain or understand or get good explanations so we could understand why this all happened,” he said.
And then Sen. Rand Paul took it to Horowitz and got him to admit what we had suspected the entire time.
