Decoding the Horowitz Report on 'bias'

We are in the midst of a spin battle over the inspector general's report issued yesterday.  Because inspectors general cannot release their reports without giving those named within it a chance to contest it, and must be able to defend every single word of it, they must stick to facts and completely documentable conclusions.  Inductive reasoning, looking at large patterns of facts and drawing conclusions, does not survive such a process.  The result is a report that is written in a kind of code.

Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal decodes the Horowitz Report on bias in a tweet thread on the subject.  Her first tweet demolishes the "no bias" meme being pushed by Democrats, including the mainstream media:

That is carefully worded as a defense.  A second tweet elaborates:

But, as she points out, there is abundant evidence of bias throughout the report.

For example, senior FBI people weeping about Trump's electoral victory, and the already infamous Strzok-Page text messages about stopping Trump:

"[Trump's] not ever going to become president, right?  Right?!"

"No.  No he won't.  We'll stop it."

(Even Chris Cillizza of CNN moans that this gives Trump "all the deep state ammo he wanted.")

Yet this get-Trump group was chosen to switch to the investigation of purported Russian influence:

 As a number of prominent Trump-supporters have claimed, this may well discredit the entire investigation by Robert Mueller.  "Fruit of the poison tree," as the legal doctrine is called.

As Ed Timperlake noted on these pages today, a huge issue is the culture of the top levels of the FBI, where people of deep bias seem to have been selected for top positions.  The specific miscreants mentioned in the report (many of them yet to be publicly identified) have corrupted those below them.  There is a severe problem in this organization:

There is also evidence of actionable misbehavior:

And (if you believe this) laughable incompetence by Comey:

Given that the firing of Comey was used as justification for appointing his good friend Mueller as special counsel, it is time for apologies, and maybe firing of Mueller (my conclusion, not Strassel's).

With the New York A.G.'s lawsuit against the Trump Foundation providing a counter-narrative for residents of the blue bubble to use to keep their spirits up, the MSM want to move on.  But spin matters less than facts in the long run.  This report is the first of three, and the facts already uncovered are damning enough that if grand juries are not already empaneled re-investigating the evident crimes of Hillary Clinton in her handling of classified emails, appointment of a special counsel is justified.

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