The unredacted House Intelligence Committee report should have been the document used all along

I haven't spent much LITD space remarking on the Mueller / Rosenstein / Comey / Nunes set of developments, for two main reasons. It strikes me as being mostly a distraction from the actual matters of import of the day, and it's fraught with arcane details upon which tribalists of one stripe or another are prone to hanging their hats for the purposes of gotcha.

The sounding of the "deep state" alarm bell is tiresome, but I think it's time to ask some serious questions about just how extensive the politicization is at the Justice Department and the FBI.

Need convincing? I offer Andrew McCarthy's piece in today's NRO.

Do read the whole thing, but let me attempt to summarize. The House Intelligence Committee has wanted to release its report on Russian interference in the 2016 election for some time, but was hampered by a back-and-forth with the DoJ and FBI over portions that those two entities wanted redacted, claiming national security risks. The committee finally released the basically blackout-free version Friday, and shortly thereafter the public was able to compare and contrast the two versions. The obvious conclusion when one does so is  . . .

Well, shortly after the redactions were lifted late on Friday, The Federalist’s Sean Davis got busy on Twitter, posting side-by-side comparisons of the original heavily redacted pages and the new, more transparent version. The disclosures are stunning. I know this will amaze you, but it turns out the redactions had absolutely nothing to do with concerns about the need to protect national security or pending investigations. Instead, the now-unredacted passages:

• Elaborate on why the FBI did not believe Flynn had lied, including quotations from Comey’s testimony.
• Reveal that for some period of time during 2016, the FBI conducted a counterintelligence (CI) investigation of Flynn.
• Note that top Obama Justice Department and FBI officials provided the committee with “conflicting testimony” about why the FBI interviewed Flynn as if he were a criminal suspect.
• Illustrate that the FBI and Justice Department originally insisted on concealment of facts helpful to Flynn that are already public.

Got that? General Flynn may well have been able to avoid his current troubles if the unmolested version had been available to the committee a long time ago.

The FBI justified its counterintelligence investigation into Flynn by claiming his behavior during the transition period had some kind of Logan Act-type treachery to it.

You can't help but detect the smell of politicization when you realize that

. . . the suggestion that his post-election contacts with Russia were improper, let alone unlawful, is absurd. Flynn was the designated national-security adviser for the incoming administration and a key member of the Trump transition team. To have communications with officials of foreign governments was a legitimate and necessary part of his job. Plus, Kislyak was a foreign agent subject to FISA surveillance, so the FBI had recordings of his communications with Flynn and knew that Flynn had done nothing improper. (It has been presumed that Flynn’s communications with Kislyak were intercepted because Kislyak, not Flynn, was the subject of a FISA warrant; now, with confirmation that Flynn was the subject of a counterintelligence investigation, we may need to revisit that presumption.)

McCarthy makes this supremely important point in his conclusion:

There is no Department of Justice in the Constitution. It is an executive-branch component created by Congress, funded with taxpayer funds appropriated by Congress, and subject to congressional oversight to ensure that its operations are conducted in accordance with their statutory purposes. Because of the sensitivity of their law-enforcement and intelligence missions, the Justice Department and its premier agency, the FBI, are shown great deference when lawmakers make requests — or even demands — for information. Contrary to what Justice Department leadership apparently believes, this deference is not an entitlement. It is result of respect earned over time by an institution that — its proud alumni like to believe — has a tradition of dealing honorably and transparently with peer branches of government.

Any law-enforcement entity, up to and including the DoJ and the FBI, is comprised of fallible human beings, so it's probably too much to ask that they never exhibit even a slight taint of ideological motivation. But that ought to be the standard so that egregious cases of it like this don't go this far.

And McCarthy's right. The president needs to quit acting like he has no power to deal with it other than whining on Twitter.