Argument: DOJ IG reportThe Crossfire Hurricane Report’s Inconvenient Findings

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s long-awaited report on the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation finally came out last Monday. Julia Sanchez writes in Just Security that “notwithstanding furious efforts from all quarters to claim otherwise, it fails to neatly validate anyone’s favored political narrative. Contra the hopes of Donald Trump’s more ardent admirers, it fails to turn up anything resembling a Deep State cabal within the FBI plotting against the president, or deliberate abuse of surveillance authorities for political ends.”

Sanchez writes that the report, however, also paints a disturbing picture of the FBI’s vaunted vetting process for warrant applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), documenting several material omissions or misrepresentations in the government’s case for wiretapping former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. “Though it does not describe an investigation motivated by political bias, [the report] is a textbook account of confirmation bias that should raise disturbing questions about the adequacy of the FISA process—and not just in this investigation,” Sanchez writes, adding:

This picture is, in its own way, and for very different reasons, as disturbing as the image of a Deep State cabal with a vendetta against Trump: Vendettas are at least specific.  Whereas the grave defects in the surveillance of Page seem more likely to be symptoms of a more apolitical, and therefore more systemic, form of bias.  Their underlying causes—reliance on sources whose claims are hard to directly check, imperfect information, case agents making judgments about which facts in a vast sea of data might be legally material—aren’t peculiar to elections but endemic to intelligence.

The investigators working Crossfire Hurricane well understood they were charged with a Sensitive Investigative Matter—one destined to draw a level of scrutiny unprecedented in the history of FISA.  Under the circumstances, you might expect them to operate with especially scrupulous exactitude.  If the Horowitz report reflects what we find when we start turning over rocks under those conditions, what kind of errors and omissions might we expect to uncover in the case files of FISA targets less likely to inspire congressional hearings?  It’s past time to find out.