The Real “Bombshells” Are About To Hit Their Targets
By Julie Kelly via American Greatness
ZeroHedge.com
Tue, 04/30/2019
The next bombshell report to drop from the Justice Department likely will earn none of the breathless fanfare and media coverage that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report received, but it could be far more incriminating.
In the next several weeks, Inspector General Michael Horowitz is expected to issue his summation of the potential abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by top officials in the Obama Administration and holdovers in the early Trump Administration who were overseeing the investigation of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
And the perpetrators of the so-called FISAgate scandal now are scrambling for cover as the bad news looms.
Horowitz announced last March that his office would examine the Justice Department’s conduct “in applications filed with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) relating to a certain U.S. person.” That U.S. person is Trump campaign associate Carter Page. In October 2016, just two weeks before the presidential election, the Justice Department submitted an application to the FISC seeking authorization to wiretap Page. The court filing accused Page, a Naval Academy graduate and unpaid campaign advisor, of being an agent of Russia.
The application cited the infamous Steele dossier—unsubstantiated political propaganda that had been funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee—as its primary source of evidence. But the specific political origin of the dossier intentionally was omitted in the court filing. (Robert Mueller similarly tap danced around the role of Fusion GPS, the political consulting firm that hired Christopher Steele to create the dossier. Mueller never mentioned the name “Fusion GPS” in the 448-page document, referring to it only vaguely as “the firm that produced the Steele reporting.”)
Former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates signed the original FISA application. It was renewed three times; subsequent signers included former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. If there’s one document that represents the malevolence, chicanery and arrogance of the original Trump-Russia collusion fraudsters, it’s the Page FISA application.
But—to borrow a favorite term of the collusion truthers—the “walls are closing in” on the FISA abusers.
Representative Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and James Jordan (R-Ohio) recently met with Horowitz and offered some ominous news for Comey and company: “We anticipate the IG’s report will come out . . . in the next four to six weeks and I think it’s highly likely that we’ll see criminal referrals coming from them,” Meadows told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on April 14.
President Trump also speculated that the inspector general’s report would contain damning allegations against former top officials for the world’s most powerful law enforcement agency.
“I think he [Horowitz] knows how big this is,” Trump told Sean Hannity in an interview last week. “The IG report coming out in three or four weeks, from what I hear, is going to be…a blockbuster because he has access to information that most people don’t.” If anyone misled the FISA court, including Comey and Yates, Trump suggested that “they’ll all be in a pile of trouble.”
Since last fall, Trump has threatened to declassify the entire application, much of which is still concealed behind redactions, but that has presumably been delayed to protect the integrity of the investigation. Once the inspector general’s report comes out, however, Trump would be free to unredact crucial portions of the application.
So the targets of the inspector general’s probe and their media pals now are spinning hard in preparation of the report’s release.
Natasha Bertrand, a reliable mouthpiece for Fusion GPS, is smearing Horowitz and raising questions about his investigation. “Former U.S. officials interviewed by the inspector general were skeptical about the quality of his probe,” she wrote in an April 17 piece for Politico. “The inspector general seemed neither well-versed in the FISA process nor receptive to the explanations, the officials said.”
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