A few thoughts about the IG report

First, LITD's broadest conclusion: As is so often the case in this fallen world, there is no unassailable good guy.

The FBI has exhibited squirrelliness going back at least to James Comey's July 2016 presser in which he spent about fifteen minutes enumerating reasons why Hillary Clinton ought to have been indicted for her email-server recklessness, and then concluded by saying he wasn't going to recommend indictment to the DoJ. There are those Peter Stzrok - Lisa Page emails that make it plain that some FBI personnel did indeed have a burning desire to do whatever they could to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.

Now, along comes this IG report (which is going to be followed by Durham's report when he's done with his investigation) that says that there was no political agenda. It concludes that, while there was no nefarious intent on the FBI's part (in fact, the agency had an "authorized purpose"), the Bureau sure was incompetent. 17 errors or omissions in the Carter Page FISA applications. Big-time reliance on the just plain bizarre Steele dossier. Bruce Ohr meeting with Steele without authorization. Ohr's wife Nellie working for Fusion GPS, the firm hired by the Hillary Clinton campaign to sniff around and find something fishy about the Trump campaign.

Adam Schiff's February 2018 memo  now looks like a flimsy partisan attempt to portray the FBI as having done a stellar job. And remember that Schiff's memo was a response to a memo by Devin Nunes, who is a tribalist of the opposite stripe (pro-Trump instead of anti).

Bill Barr, who is the one who has sent John Durham on his mission, seems a little too keen to blast the IG report, given that an Attorney General's interest is supposed to be in impartially upholding the law. Then again, Durham is using a wider array of sources, and may truly be able to refute the IG report's portrayal of the FBI as merely bumbling.

Okay, that's it. These ever-mounting layers of investigation may establish certain facts for the record, but they are not going to have significant impact on the unfolding political events of the coming year. With a rocking economy and a field of Democratic presidential candidates consisting entirely of radical yet entirely unexciting leftists, the smart money is on another four years of the Very Stable Genius bringing embarrassment to post-America and making a train wreck of its foreign policy.