Biases

Bookworm agrees with Andy McCarthy’s comments about IG Horowitz’s failure to apply common sense, and she adds another important point.

Here’s the way it goes if you’re a lawyer, sizing up a jury: Lawyers understand that everyone has biases, or filters, through which he or she views the world. In many, indeed most, situations, our biases are acceptable and relevant only insofar as they affect our own decisions in life. For example, the fact that you are fond of cops because your dad was a cop is a fairly irrelevant matter in most areas of life. You might like donuts more than the next person, or follow a police-friendly feed on Twitter, but your preference (or bias or filter) does not affect justice or safety or honor. However, if you’re being sized up for a jury in a DUI case, and the defense is police malfeasance, your strong fondness for cops is an unacceptable bias. The defense attorney will act strenuously to ensure that you’re not on the jury.

Likewise, if you’re an FBI agent who loathes Trumps and loves Hillary, but your beat is organized crime in North Dakota, your political preferences in the run-up and follow-up to the 2016 election are irrelevant. However, if you have those same biases and you’re working on either the Hillary or the Trump investigation, those biases should presumptively disqualify you from working on the case(s), in the same way that the cop lover shouldn’t be a jury on a case that has as its central issue police behavior.

Once Horowitz identified the blazing, oozing contempt that animated top FBI officials on the Hillary and Trump cases, that should have been game over. Just as Comey overreached by imputing a lack of intent to Hillary, so did Horowitz overreach by stating that, manifest biases notwithstanding, it was still possible that these biases did not affect the FBI agents’ behavior. It was not Horowitz’s responsibility to speculate about the effect of the bias. It was enough that the bias was there and that the FBI not only didn’t bar these agents from working the cases, it encouraged them.

(And yes, I’m perfectly aware that the facts Horowitz adduced showed that the Fibbies repeatedly acted on their bias, all to Hillary’s benefit. I’m just challenging Horowitz’s own standards here, rather than making a whole argument about his erroneous, ridiculous conclusions.)

I applaud Horowitz for honestly reporting the facts; I consider him a coward and a failure for refusing to reach the obvious conclusion to be derived from those facts: the Clinton investigation was completely, irreparably, and possibly criminally compromised by agents whose biases went to the heart of the case.

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