‘He will deliver a detailed account of what he found … along with recommendations as to how to make our judicial and investigative systems better…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A long-awaited report from the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, will conclude in December, outlining some of the questionable conduct by partisan FBI agents during the Russian collusion hoax.
Following the Dec. 9 release of the report, Horowitz will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Dec. 11, said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, in a press release following a letter from Horowitz.
“I appreciate all the hard work by Mr. Horowitz and his team regarding the Carter Page FISA warrant application and the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign,”Graham said.
“I look forward to reviewing the report and hearing Mr. Horowitz’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he will deliver a detailed account of what he found regarding his investigation, along with recommendations as to how to make our judicial and investigative systems better,” he continued.
The IG investigation, which is being conducted in conjunction with a criminal probe in the Justice Department led by special prosecutor John Durham, has sought to examine the false pretenses under which Obama-era FBI officials sought permission from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court in order to spy on Page, a foreign-policy adviser for now-President Donald Trump during his campaign.
The FBI investigation into claims of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign was based largely on the dispatches of the now-debunked Steele Dossier, which was later revealed publicly to have been commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Using the left-wing research firm Fusion GPS as its conduit, Democrats secretly worked with top FBI officials, such as Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok, who already was overseeing a major investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to send and receive classified State Department material.
McCabe and Strzok were among the many operatives within the intelligence community who were rebuffed in previous IG reports for their misconduct and partisan, anti-Trump bias.
Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier documents, was a British spy with links to the Kremlin who had been fired as an FBI informant after he was discovered to be leaking information.
In May, open-records investigations revealed that Steele had met with a State Department official 10 days prior to the FISA warrant in 2016 and said he was “keen to see this information [the dossier] come to light prior to November 8,” the date of the U.S. presidential election.
“This important information further demonstrates the bias of the primary source of material that was the basis for the Carter Page FISA warrant,” Graham wrote in a letter to Horowitz and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Graham, a frequent ally of Trump’s, has been vocal of his support of the DOJ investigations into the corrupt intelligence community after having previously backed the two-year Mueller investigation into Russian collusion.
When the probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller yielded no evidence, Graham publicly declared that it was time to investigate the other side of the story and shed light on the Left’s own collusion within the American government.
Graham has received some criticism for the slow pace of his own Senate probes but has noted that he was awaiting the findings from the Justice Department’s thorough investigations.
Those investigations required that Attorney General William Barr and his investigators to interview sources in the United Kingdom, Italy and Australia who had been part of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” sting operation against Trump.
House Democrats, meanwhile, pro-actively seeking to deflect revelations of their own behavior, quickly pivoted to new charges to lodge an ongoing impeachment probe against Trump that he abused his power in a July 25 call with the newly elected Ukrainian president.
The timing of Horowitz’s appearance in the Senate should prove interesting as the House is likely to be considering an impeachment vote around the same time.
The investigations are intrinsically linked as Trump, weathered by the slanderous Russian collusion probe, sought to uncover whether Ukraine had worked with Democrats to help craft and spread the false narrative in 2016 and if it might be working to support democratic candidates such as Vice President Joe Biden in the upcoming 2020 race.
A request for comment to the Inspector General’s office was not immediately answered, though sources have previously declined to comment on pending investigations, citing DOJ policy.