Who guards the guardians of the guardians

We are getting very meta here. From Inspector General Report Shows Special Counsel Replicated FBI Abuses by Margot Cleveland.

Cleveland is pointing out some less remarked implications of the IG Horowitz investigation. One of which is that Special Counsel Mueller's investigation of the FBI and Crossfire Hurricane replicated the same errors of the original bad actions of the FBI. The guardians (Mueller) were replicating the criminal acts of the guardians (FBI) who are supposed to be guarding us from criminals.

In short, the special counsel’s team proved itself equally incompetent in investigating and screening the “intel” used to obtain the Page surveillance orders, and in failing to accurately and fully inform the FISA court (FISC) of the evidence gathered by the FBI. As the IG noted “that so many basic and fundamental errors were made on four FISA applications by three separate, hand-picked teams, on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations that was briefed to the highest levels within the FBI and that FBI officials expected would eventually be subjected to close scrutiny, raised significant questions regarding the FBI chain of command’s management and supervision of the FISA process.” That also means Mueller and his chain of command.

It also wasn’t mere incompetence on display: The special counsel’s office also engaged in much of the same misconduct the IG identified. For instance, emblematic of Mueller’s complicity in misconduct Horowitz identified is the fact that the special counsel continued to use Bruce Ohr as a conduit to feed “intel” to the FBI from Steele after Steele was terminated as a confidential human source.

[snip]

While it may be some time before we know whether the special counsel report included significant inaccuracies, given the details contained in the IG’s report, it is now clear that the Mueller report omitted significant evidence relevant to whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. In fact, while the special counsel report claimed “this report embodies factual and legal determinations that the Office believes to be accurate and complete to the greatest extent possible,” the IG report provided more perspective on the question of Russia collusion than the entire $30-million special counsel probe.

In fact, Mueller’s failure to address the veracity, or rather the fallacy, of Steele’s dossier cements the reality that the special counsel sought not to discern the truth, but to bury Trump. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board recognized, “the Steele dossier was central to obtaining the Page warrant, and the leaks about the dossier fanned two years of media theories about Russian collusion that was one reason Mr. Mueller was appointed as special counsel. Mr. Mueller owed the public an explanation of how much of the dossier could be confirmed or repudiated.”

Yet, as “the Horowitz report makes clear, the FBI knew that most of the Steele dossier’s claims were unreliable,” and “Team Mueller made a deliberate choice to tiptoe around it,” even telling Congress in his opening statement, that “he would not address ‘matters related to the so-called Steele dossier,’ which he said were out of his purview.”

“This makes no sense,” the editorial board reasoned. But it does. It makes eminent sense once you realize the special counsel office served to continue a witch hunt, and once those efforts proved unsuccessful, Mueller’s team reverted instead to obscuring that fact.

Cleveland's inferences and conclusions seem aggressive but not obviously wrong.

I had anticipated that the Horowitz report was going to be a damp squib but it certainly has revealed much more than the establishment class of Washington would have wished. Mueller, Comey/McCabe and the FISA courts are supposed to have been multiple layers of citizen rights guardians. Instead, it appears that all the guardians were guarding their institutional interests and had little commitment to citizen's rights.

Reminds me of Robert Conquest's Third Law.

The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.