Politicized investigations, interference in elections, and abusive targeting by law enforcement are all the makings of a juicy political scandal. And President Donald Trump would like us to believe that such a scandal, with each of these components, is real and — even if he can’t name any crime that might have been committed — directed at him. That’s why he has promoted the lazy moniker “Obamagate,” an all-encompassing term for the vague allegations of wrongdoing surrounding the conduct of the previous administration and the investigators probing the ties between his campaign and the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election.
On Friday, another arm of the Trump administration revealed yet another inquiry into the “Obamagate” haze. FBI Director Christopher Wray, apparently under pressure from the president himself, has opened an internal review of the handling of the case of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
But this Trump-driven obsession has thus far proved quite wide of the mark. The only serious wrongdoing uncovered came in the applications for surveillance of Carter Page, who had a low-level and short-lived position advising the Trump campaign. The FBI had legitimate reason to be suspicious of Page — he had previously been the subject of recruitment efforts by Russian intelligence, and some of his ties to Moscow remain unexplained — but DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that officials made voluminous errors when applying to surveil him. Yet Horowitz also found there was no indication of political bias against Page in the decision-making, and that the investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016 more broadly was properly predicated. What errors there were, he found, often stemmed from lack of proper oversight; further work from Horowitz has indicated that the errors in the Page surveillance may be common in the FBI’s conduct, raising yet more troubling questions. Continue reading.