March 16th, 2016: I cannot believe Trump is likely to be an actual serious candidate for
president.
July the 21st, 2016: Trump is a disaster.
I have no idea how destabilizing his presidency would be.
August 26, 2016: Just went to the southern Virginia Walmart.
I could smell the Trump support.
October the 19th, 2016: Trump is a [expletive] idiot.
He is unable to provide a coherent answer.
Sorry to the kids out there.
These are the people that made a decision that Clinton didn’t do anything wrong and
that counterintelligence investigation of Trump was warranted.
The investigation also uncovered text messages between other FBI employees expressing support
for candidate and president Trump, correct?
That’s correct.
So FBI employees held personal political views that were both favorable and unfavorable to
the candidate at that time.
That’s correct.
The chairman gave an uncharacteristic, flowery, heated opening that went on for some 40 minutes
and produced a lengthy record of emails from Lisa Page and Peter Strzok which repeated
demonstrated hostility toward candidate Donald Trump.
He went on to say these were the people in charge.
When I read your summary of your findings, you didn’t find either of them to be in
charge, did you?
On this investigation, we did not.
Okay.
When it comes to expletives, you also on page 339 of your report, found some agents at the
FBI who had exactly opposite political viewpoint— Correct.
And were very positive toward candidate Trump and very open in their use of expletives to
demonstrate that.
And those individuals to be clear were not part of the Crossfire Hurricane team but were
in a different field office interacting with the Crossfire Hurricane team.
And I hope we can all concede the point, we don’t believe anyone in this capacity, this
delicate capacity, with life-changing decision making every single day, should be so politically
biased to call into question their values and their character.
That’s correct and I made this point last year when this issue came up.
Individuals at the Justice Department, at the FBI are allowed to have political views,
they’re allowed to be voters, they’re allowed to be engaged citizens.
They should be.
This is Senators Feinstein and Durbin during today’s Senate Judiciary Hearing with Inspector
General Horowitz over the release of the IG report.
Now, the GOP had hinged their hopes on the notion that the IG report would prove that
there was political bias that led to the opening of the Russia investigation and that the whole
thing would be rendered completely void and Trump would be exonerated.
Trump himself said that it led to illegal wiretapping of Trump Tower.
He went on the campaign trail and, to this day, told the story of quote “two lovers”
in the FBI allegedly conspiring to overthrow him.
The conspiracy theories go on and on.
But when the IG report came out this week, it showed that, in fact, there was no political
bias and that the investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia
was legally justified.
But look, we knew that.
The fact that we even needed a full-blown investigation to look into some random charge
that Trump blurted out during some stream of consciousness diatribe as the result of
some errant synapse firing in his brain is not only absurd, but a complete and total
waste of taxpayer funds.
Of course the Russia investigation was justified.
We already knew that Don Jr, Kushner and Manafort met with a Kremlin-linked lawyer for dirt
on Hillary Clinton at Trump Tower.
We knew that Paul Manafort shared polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, who has ties
to the Kremlin.
We knew that Mike Flynn discussed lifting sanctions on Russia, which is a violation
of the Logan Act, prohibiting citizens from interfering in foreign diplomacy.
We knew that Trump asked Russia on national television to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails,
and that Russia attempted to do just that only HOURS later.
We knew that Trump committed obstruction of justice on 10 separate occasions so that those
aforementioned examples of collusion would never be revealed.
It’s like we’ve got video evidence, witnesses, and a confession that someone stole a car,
but now we’re wondering if we should’ve ever been looking into that person in the
first place.
When you’ve already caught someone committing a crime because of a mountain of evidence,
then yeah, it’s probably safe to say that the investigation into them was justified.
But what WAS news in the IG report is that the example Trump had so heavily leaned on
to prove bias – the text messages between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok – actually showed
up as biased IN FAVOR of Trump.
According to the IG report, texts were unearthed between two other FBI agents who texted that
it quote “just got real.
I saw a lot of scared MFers on my way to work this morning.
Start looking for a new job fellas.
Haha,” to which the other agent responded “LOL.”
And the first one wrote, “Come January I’m going to just get a big bowl of popcorn and
sit back and watch.”
The other agent replied: “That's hilarious!”
In another set of texts, one supervisory agent at the FBI wrote that seeing Trump win was
like watching a Superbowl comeback, later saying that he quote “didn’t want a criminal
to be in the White House.”
And yet, after seeing this information released in the report, not only that there was no
evidence of bias in opening the investigation against Trump but that there were actually
texts from REPUBLICAN members of the FBI showing bias in HIS favor, still – STILL – Lindsey
Graham opted to use his time during the hearing to read yet more text messages between Lisa
Page and Peter Strzok.
It’s like Republicans are physically incapable of realizing when their defense has been completely
dismantled and knowing when to regroup.
And that was put on full display at the very top, when Trump, after the IG report was released,
just straight up pretended that it validated his complaints—
The IG report just came out and I was just briefed on it and it’s a disgrace what’s
happened with respect to the things that were done to our country.
It should never again happen to another president.
It is incredible, far worse than I would’ve ever thought possible.
And it’s an embarrassment to our country.
It’s dishonest.
It’s everything that a lot of people thought it would be expect far worse, so I’m gonna
get some very detailed briefings but they are—it’s a very sad day when I see that.
It’s a very sad day when a lot of people see that.
They had no nothing, it was concocted.
You say what you want, but it was a—probably something that’s never happened in the history
of our country.
Of course, it didn’t validate his complaints at all, but has that really ever stopped him
from spouting lies that advance his own agenda without regard to any semblance of reality
whatsoever?
The simple fact is that people are ALLOWED to have political opinions, they are allowed
to care about the political process, so long as they don’t let their political opinions
interfere in their work, and the IG report revealed that they didn’t.
Case closed.
So Republicans like Lindsey Graham can continue to bury his head in the sand and pretend that
his now-debunked defenses of Trump are still in any way valid, but they’re honestly serving
no purpose other than showing just how much of a partisan hack he truly is.