Vin Suprynowicz

First scan of FBI Inspector General Horowitz’s 500-page report into the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton “How It’s Now OK for a High Government Official to Delete 30,000 e-Mails That Were Under Subpoena As Long As We Figure ‘She Didn’t Really Mean It'” affair.

What remains to be seen is how much skullduggery they shoveled into the “Appendices” — which of course we, the taxpayers who so handsomely fund all these shenanigans, aren’t allowed to see.

But just at first glance, it seems to me we’ve heard a lot, recently, about how the IG is allowed to place in such reports only “facts,” not his own (or anyone else’s) uncorroborated “opinions.” Yet at page 497, here, Mr. Horowitz (or whoever rewrote this thing to make it “all nice”) states “Through the collective efforts of generations of FBI employees, the FBI has developed and earned a reputation as one of the world’s premier law enforcement agencies. The FBI has gained this reputation, in significant part, because of its professionalism, impartiality, non-political enforcement of the law, and adherence to detailed policies, practices, and norms.”

Really? Leaving aside the files the closeted J. Edgar Hoover was known to maintain in order to keep his political “overseers” in line — since that will probably remain hard to “prove” until this extra-constitutional Bureau is deservedly disbanded and they break open Rod “Rasputin” Rosenstein’s safe . . . was the sniper assassination of Vicki Weaver (by a now-infamous member of the brilliantly Orwellian “Hostage Rescue Team”!) in her kitchen an “adherence to detailed policies, practices, and norms,” demonstrating the “professionalism” that helped develop and maintain the Bureau’s current “reputation as one of the world’s premier law enforcement agencies”? (Then why the $3 million settlement?)

How about crushing assassinated Branch Davidian church members’ bodies into the dirt by running the Bureau’s armored vehicles back and forth across them, and then holding the fire engines a mile away while the fire resulting from the FBI’s “ferret rounds” was allowed to incinerate that church community’s women and children as they cowered in their bunker, back in the spring of 1993?

For that matter, weren’t FBI agents instrumental, back in 1964, in helping out Allen Dulles and his shooters by harassing and threatening into silence any Kennedy assassination witnesses who kept insisting shots had come from the Grassy Knoll? Hey, at least they were “professional” about it . . . right?

Didn’t the Washington Post report in April, 2015: “Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000,” adding “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death”?

Didn’t that Washington Post article note that admissions from the FBI and Department of Justice “confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques — like hair and bite-mark comparisons — that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989”?

More recently, the Bureau has done SO well, handling “hot line” phone calls from people who patiently give their names and addresses, and then warn of precisely which troubled young man (Nikolas de Jesus Cruz, for starters) who attends precisely which high school (Margery Stoneman Douglas) had been bragging Online that he intended to become next “professional school shooter.”

Why, as soon as those calls came in, the crack FBI call center staff . . . called it a day and went out for beers. They assigned NO ONE to do ANYTHING. They didn’t even refer the call to some BOY SCOUT working on a Merit Badge.

For that matter, hadn’t Omar Mateen’s mosque contacted the FBI with concerns about him? Hadn’t the Pulse nightclub shooter’s co-workers contacted law enforcement expressing alarm at his comments and behavior? Yet the FBI did nothing — in part because (as it turns out) Mateen’s father had been an FBI “informant” for 11 years, and the FBI was hoping to enlist the son, as well?

No room here to even start on how well the FBI handled things back in 2001, when they were warned about strange Arabs in this country taking flight lessons in which the “students” expressed an interest only in learning to take off and fly the planes . . . no interest at all, for some puzzling reason, in how to LAND.

Yep, the FBI sure makes my list of “one of the world’s premier law enforcement agencies” . . . at least until they find someone better suited to replace Peter Sellers in the role of Inspector Jacques Clouseau.

— V.S.