Horowitz's revenge, Obama's plausible deniability, and the spooks' sting

Mark Tapscott writes in Lifezette three scary facts about the FBI scandal. 1. First, there’s Horowitz’s revenge.

…a few months before Horowitz was sworn into the job in 2012, Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general and previously deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, gutted the IG act provision that mandates their access to all necessary documents. Holder acted at the behest of then-FBI Director Robert Mueller and others at the bureau.

Holder — who would subsequently be held in contempt by Congress for refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents in the “Fast and Furious” scandal — thus forced Horowitz to request in writing any documents he sought from the bureau.

There then ensued a three-year struggle in Congress and the media that culminated in Obama having no choice but to sign the Inspector General Empowerment Act of 2016, which removed all doubt about the IG’s access.

…There is an old saying in Washington that “things that go around have a way of coming back around.”

2. “President Obama was sending messages and receiving messages on Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Jim Comey knew that, and when President Obama went on television and said, ‘There’s no issue here, she didn’t really intend to cause harm,’ what he was really saying in essence is, ‘You’d better let her off, because if you wind up accusing her, you wind up accusing me.’

“Comey followed that lead. And the notion that this was somehow something that he had to do for the welfare of the country, there’s a lot of disingenuous claptrap.” In other words, preserving Obama’s “plausible deniability” was priority number one.

Third, there’s the spooks’ sting. These two scandals are loaded with spymasters. The most powerful ones weren’t even at the FBI. Think former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan. And don’t forget former national security adviser Susan Rice or former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power.

All these people enjoyed years of unfettered, or nearly so, access to the incredible digital and electronic listening power developed by the U.S. intelligence community in the wake of 9/11, including the ability to “unmask” any lawmaker, congressional staffer, corporate executive, philanthropic executive or donor, judge, foreign official, presidential appointee, diplomat, or military officer overheard in any of the hundreds of millions of conversations intercepted by the listening agencies.

Read more here.