IG Report on FBI: No Bias Conclusion May Not Be Supported | National Review

IG Report on FBI: No Bias Conclusion May Not Be Supported | National Review
But who knows?

You’ve got to hand it to Michael Horowitz: 

The Justice Department inspector general’s much-anticipated report on the Clinton-emails investigation may be half-baked, but if it is, it is the most comprehensive, meticulously detailed, carefully documented, thoughtfully reasoned epic in the history of half-bakery.
Why say do I say the report “may be half-baked”? 

Why don’t I just come out and declare, “The report is half-baked”? 

Well, I figure if I write this column in the IG’s elusive style, we’ll have the Rosetta Stone we need to decipher the report.
See, you probably sense that I believe the report is half-baked. 

But if I say it “may be” half-baked . . . well, technically that means it may not be, too. 

I mean, who really knows, right?
If that annoys you, 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?
Not in so many words, of course. 

The trick here is the premise the IG establishes from the start: It’s not my job to draw firm conclusions about why things happened the way they did.

In fact, it’s not even my job to determine whether investigative decisions were right or wrong. 

The cop-out is that we are dealing here with “discretionary” calls; therefore, the IG rationalizes, the investigators must be given very broad latitude. 

Consequently, the IG says his job is not to determine whether any particular decision was correct; just whether, on some otherworldly scale of reasonableness, the decision was defensible. 

And he makes that determination by looking at every decision in isolation.
But is that the way we evaluate decisions in the real world?...

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