IG Horowitz has weaved a no-common-sense report.

Andrew McCarthy, as you would expect, has dived in to read the IG report. He writes in National Review,

…try wading through 568 pages of this stuff, particularly on the central issue of the investigators’ anti-Trump bias. The report acknowledges that contempt for Trump was pervasive among several of the top FBI and DOJ officials making decisions about the investigation. So this deep-seated bias must have affected the decision-making, right? Well, the report concludes, who really knows?

In every criminal trial, the defense lawyer tries to sow reasonable doubt by depicting every allegation, every factual transaction, as if it stood alone. In a drug case, if the defendant was photographed delivering a brown paper bag on Wednesday, the lawyer argues, “Well, we don’t have X-ray vision, how do we really know there was heroin in the bag?” The jurors are urged that when they consider what happened Wednesday, there is only Wednesday; they must put out of their minds that text from Tuesday, when the defendant told his girlfriend, “I always deliver the ‘product’ in paper bags.”

Fortunately, the judge ends up explaining to the jury that, down here on Planet Earth, common sense applies. In our everyday lives, we don’t look at related events in isolation; we view them in conjunction because they read on each other. Let’s say on Monday I confide to my friend that I can’t stand Bob, and on Tuesday I tell Bob I can’t join him for dinner because I have other plans. It may or may not be true that I have other plans, but common sense tells you my disdain for Bob has factored into the decision — even if I don’t announce that fact to Bob.

For all his assiduous attention to detail, IG Horowitz has weaved a no-common-sense report.

On August 8, 2016, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, borderline hysterical, texts her lover, agent Peter Strzok, about GOP candidate Donald Trump: “He’s not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”

Strzok replies, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

Now mind you, Page isn’t just any old lawyer; she is counsel to the FBI’s deputy director (Andrew McCabe) and involved in virtually every significant decision the bureau makes. And Strzok is not any old agent; he is deputy assistant director and one of the FBI’s top counterespionage agents — and he steered both relevant investigations, Clinton-emails and Trump-Russia.

This August 8 text exchange does not occur in a vacuum. It is part of ceaseless stream of anti-Trump bile. It is, moreover, just a week before the infamous text in which we learn that top-level bureau officials met in the deputy director’s office to discuss what they saw as the harrowing possibility of a Trump presidency; Strzok urged that, though highly unlikely, this prospect was so intolerable that the bureau needed an “insurance policy” against it — i.e., the Russia investigation.

The August 8 text also occurs against a backdrop in which the FBI has rushed to close the Clinton-emails investigation on an arbitrary deadline for patently political reasons — no other criminal investigation is guided by the electoral calendar. And it occurs at the moment the FBI is moving aggressively to turn its counterintelligence powers against the Trump campaign: An informant has already been deployed, intelligence agents are mobilizing, foreign intelligence contacts have been tapped, and the bureau will soon submit to the FISA court an application to surveil Trump adviser Carter Page — an application that breaks every rule in the book: anonymous foreign sources spouting multiple hearsay, no corroboration, no disclosure to the court that it comes from the opposition presidential campaign, no explanation that the foreigner who supplied the unverified allegations has been booted from the investigation for lying, etc.

…When Ted Cruz dropped out of the GOP presidential race, making Trump the de facto nominee, the very first thing Strzok said upon hearing the news from Page was, “Now the pressure really starts to finish MYE” — i.e., “Mid Year Exam,” the code name for the Clinton caper. The best way to “stop” Trump was to free Hillary to beat him. So, the bureau simultaneously labored to close the case on her and invent a case on him.

In the blink of an eye, then-director Comey was briefing Obama’s National Security Council on Carter Page; the Obama intelligence agencies were tapping their foreign partners, targeting Trump-campaign advisers to run informants at, and internalizing the Steele dossier. While the FBI scooped up the last laptops it needed to complete the predetermined closing of the emails probe, Attorney General Lynch had her convenient tarmac chat with Bill Clinton, and the bureau conducted the perfunctory interview with Hillary — an interview so pointless that the FBI and Justice Department did not object to the presence of Mrs. Clinton’s co-conspirators in the room, even though the IG report concedes that this flouted elementary investigative protocols.

…The only thing that mattered in the Clinton case was that the FBI avoid doing anything too grossly indefensible in implementing the months-long strategy to close the case without charges after appearing to do an energetic investigation. But the Trump case matters because it “MATTERS” — because in the Trump case, Strzok and Page and the others actually get to do what the FBI usually does: make a case on a bad guy we have to “stop” — informants, wiretaps, subpoenas, predawn search warrants with guns drawn, charging people who lie to us, threatening decades of imprisonment against witnesses we’re trying to flip.

…The candidate they were almost certain would win got the case dropped; the candidate they needed an “insurance policy” against . . . well, whaddya know — the case against him is still going . . . and going . . . and going.

Did bias have anything to do with that? In 568 pages that leave out the Trump half of the story, we’re told the answer is, “Who really knows?”

I think we know.

Read more here.