I think everyone remembers that Rudy Giuliani played a significant role in the Trump presidential campaign and was especially visible during the last month or so. On October 25th he made a couple of appearances on TV in which he hinted broadly that the campaign had an October Surprise coming.
On Fox and Friends he was asked if Trump had anything planned other than "inspiring rallies" and he said (at the 8:50 mark) "yes." When asked what that was he replied
“Heh-heh-heh,” Mr. Giuliani laughed. “You’ll see.”
Appearing to enjoy his own coy reply, Mr. Giuliani resumed chuckling: “Ha-ha-ha.”
“When will this happen?” Ms. Earhardt asked.
“We got a couple of surprises left,” Mr. Giuliani said, smiling.
Later that day he appeared on another show and gleefully reiterated his claim. You can see it at the 2 minute mark in the following video:
https://youtu.be/L-4mDUS1a9w
Two days later James Comey sent his notorious letter.
On November 4th Salon's Sophia Tesfaye reported that Giuliani went on Fox and Friends again and was openly bragging about that gambit:
WATCH: Rudy Giuliani admits that Trump campaign had advanced warning from the @FBI about Comey's letter. pic.twitter.com/7AOJopgQOB
He said he had expected it 3 or 4 weeks previous and had heard about FBI agents upset about Clinton not being charged since July. They were especially angry that they couldn't get a hold of her medical records.
This was four days before the election. And that appearance prompted Reps. Elijah E. Cummings and John Conyers, the Ranking Members of the House Committees on Oversight and Government Reform and Judiciary to ask the Inspector General of the Department of Justice to investigate the leaks Giuliani was bragging about receiving. The result of that investigation was assumed to be included in the Inspector General's report that was released last week. It was not.
This is very odd and unlike this IG who has a reputation for thoroughness. It's particularly odd since within the report itself there is a lot of evidence that there was tremendous hostility to Clinton among this group of FBI agents centered around the NY office but the IG didn't summarize any of it or offer any conclusion. Some analysts have assumed this means there is an ongoing investigation but there is no official word to that effect. It's just left hanging out there, unresolved.
Today the House Judiciary Committee will be hearing testimony from the Inspector General Michael Horowitz. And one hopes that the Democrats will be prepared to ask him about all this.
And it isn't all of it by any means. There was the big Bret Baier "scoop" days before the election in which he claimed that sources told him that Clinton was going to be indicted after the election:
He had to apologize for that report later, admitting that his FBI "sources" were wrong. But it was already out in the ether and Trump had made it a central theme of his rallies which had been carried live by the networks and millions of people heard it. As KellyAnne Conway Trump's campaign manager at the time said on MSNBC when asked if Trump would correct his claims, "well, the damage is done to Hillary Clinton. No matter how it's being termed, the voters are hearing it for what it is, a culture of corruption."
It seems to have worked exactly as "someone" hoped it would.
Last Friday night, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), once again proving that he's a few pecans short of a fruitcake, did it again. He told Laura Ingraham that he had received leaks from Trump supporting FBI agents as well:
In light of IG's failure to look at leaking/anti-Clinton bias among agents in NYC field office, this seems quite relevant. Nunes says "good FBI agents" told him about Weiner laptop in late September 2016. pic.twitter.com/BU6ysY7Xwn
The ranking member of the committee Adam Schiff (D-CA)said on Sunday that he'd never heard anything about that so if it was a "whistleblower" he forgot to share the evidence all this time with his fellows on the committee. Giuliani, meanwhile, is on a tear, saying the whole top echelon of the FBI needs to be replaced with his friends, the "honest" New York FBI agents.
The report did conclude that the FBI played it straight in the Clinton email investigation even as it showed that a couple of the investigators were hostile to Trump and that former FBI director Comey was insubordinate and showed poor professional judgment. (And whether he admits it or not, the report indicates quite clearly that Comey's judgment was influenced by this cabal of FBI agents who were pressing for him to "lock her up.") The Republicans played the refs very, very hard and it's fair to conclude that they may have played Inspector General Horowitz too since he focused on all the specious Trump accusations and left the more damning evidence of the successful FBI sabotage against the Clinton campaign hovering between the lines.
And naturally, all this information about the FBI agents scheming to sabotage the Clinton campaign is being ignored in the press in favor of the sensational text message from Peter Strzok to his girlfriend Lisa Page in which he said "we will stop him" when his girlfriend lamented that Donald Trump might become president. As Yogi Berra said, it's like deja vu all over again. Once again the Trump team's misconduct is downplayed while petty misdeeds that feed the Trump narrative of grievance and victimization are emphasized.
Strzok and Page are famous names now. We’ve read their texts. We know some of the most intimate details of of their lives. Who are the FBI agents whose “hatred” of one candidate prompted the Comey letter? What’s in their chat history? Will we ever get that part of the story?
A cabal of FBI agents in the New York office with loyalty to Trump and Giuliani hectored their bosses, leaked to the press, had former agents go on television to put the Department of Justice and the FBI under pressure to act harshly against Hillary Clinton, even when if was outside the norms, rules and laws of the department. They were successful beyond their wildest dreams.
The media very helpfully obliged them:
Extensive CJR analysis latest to make the case: NYT, our greatest press organization, owes itself & readers serious reckoning w email-centrism of its 2016 coverage.
It mattered and deserves real look.https://t.co/t0DWxZStnOpic.twitter.com/tOGtGDyOdD
The media have done no introspection on this issue and the dynamic continues to this day. The press does a lot of critical coverage of Trump but they will leap at any chance to "balance the scales" no matter how ludicrous as we have seen once again this past week when the GOP handed them the Strzok text as if they'd just found the ark of the covenant.
The Republicans will be happy to spoon feed them buckets of "oppo" to fill their desire to be even-handed as soon as the next presidential campaign begins. And the end result will be as distorting of the facts and the truth as this inane narrative that poor Donald Trump was the victim of an FBI plot to deny him the presidency when he won the election at least in part because the FBI sabotaged his opponent.
It's enough to give you a migraine. But that's the idea.
