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Why the CIA Needs Its Own Horowitz Report
No need to speculate: The intelligence agencies saw Trump as a de facto agent of the Kremlin.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
June 29, 2018 6:36 p.m. ET
Now that the world has digested the Horowitz report, notice how much of the story it doesn’t tell. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is treated as a closed loop when, in fact, much of its decision making was based on intelligence and advice supplied by other agencies.
Michael Horowitz deals with some of this information in a classified appendix, which the public can’t see. Even so, as Justice Department inspector general, he is not authorized to examine and dissect the internal communications and decision-making of other agencies the way he did the FBI’s. Yet the necessity of doing so fairly screams at us.
Mr. Horowitz mentions Russia many times in relation to the Trump collusion investigation but never in relation to the Hillary Clinton email investigation. He refers to secret intelligence that was pivotal to FBI Chief James Comey’s decision to intervene publicly in the Clinton case, but he doesn’t mention (as media reporting last year did) its Russian origins.
He tells us the FBI regarded the intercepted information, involving a purported improper communication by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, as “objectively false.” He doesn’t tell us, as the Washington Post and CNN did last year, that some in the FBI regarded the information as a Russian plant.
He tells us that Mrs. Clinton and President Obama exchanged emails on her private server while Mrs. Clinton was especially vulnerable in the “territory of a foreign adversary.” He doesn’t tell us the foreign adversary was Russia.
One thing we learned, because Mr. Horowitz blurted it out in Senate testimony on June 18, is that the Loretta Lynch information, so crucial to Mr. Comey’s actions, has been kept from the public and even members of Congress because it “was classified at such a high level by the intelligence community.” Which is certainly convenient for the intelligence community.
Let’s be realistic. We’ve been told officially many times that Russia didn’t hide its activity in the 2016 race: It carried out its meddling in a blunt, in-your-face manner that would have been seen as a direct challenge to our own intelligence agencies. These agencies, in turn, viewed Mr. Trump as a witting or unwitting Kremlin agent.
We don’t need to speculate about this. The FBI’s Mr. Comey, since Election Day, has been a model of discretion compared with Obama CIA chief John Brennan and Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Mr. Brennan suggested on national TV that Vladimir Putin possesses secret information he uses to control President Trump. Mr. Clapper, also on national TV, called Mr. Trump a Kremlin “asset” whose election was secured by Russian meddling.
Their involvement in the events Mr. Horowitz details was extensive and pervasive and yet these men are invisible in his report. And it is hardly plausible that they were more restrained in their accusations against Mr. Trump in their private dealings with Mr. Comey before the election than they have been on TV since.
Which brings us to Mr. Comey’s potentially most consequential decision, his reopening of the Hillary email investigation just before Election Day, which many Democrats and independent analysts say may inadvertently have elected Mr. Trump.
Mr. Horowitz finds no convincing explanation of why a month elapsed between the surfacing of the Weiner laptop and Mr. Comey’s action. It might be useful, though, to understand what else was going on between Sept. 26 and Oct. 28. The
Yahoo news article based on the Steele dossier had recently appeared. A Mother Jones piece would soon appear. Inquiries about the Steele dossier would have been pouring into the agency. The FBI would soon break off relations with Christopher Steele for speaking to the press. Harry Reid would soon exploit the FBI’s possession of the dossier to try to get its allegations into the media.
Mr. Comey would have seen that a partisan explosion was coming. Nothing would remain secret. Even in the expected Hillary victory, a GOP Congress would insist on an investigation.
This is the environment in which he made a decision that objectively seems aimed at redeeming the FBI’s reputation as a straight shooter amid a welter of intelligence community actions that eventually would be exposed and second-guessed.
An under-remarked facet of the Horowitz report reveals just how much illegal leaking to the press FBI officials were guilty of. The same rock needs to be turned over with respect to Mr. Brennan’s and Mr. Clapper’s former agencies. If Mr. Putin’s goal was to make a mockery of U.S. democracy, his most useful if unwitting allies may well have been our so-called intelligence community.
Mr. Comey’s FBI is not the only intelligence branch that needs a good shaking out. Historians have a strong case already that both sets of today’s partisan talking points are valid: The Obama intelligence agencies were biased against Mr. Trump and also blunderingly helped elect him—a conclusion based in fact and yet so disconcerting that the press has turned away from it.
WSJ: Why the CIA Needs Its Own Horowitz Report
