I have a hunch that this declassification process is what prompted Mueller's public negotiation attempt. Mueller's job (his real job) is to protect Obama, the intelligence community, the law enforcement community, and the Clintons, probably in that order. (There's a non-zero chance Obama is actually just above the Clintons on Mueller's priority list; if that's the case Obama should be very worried). Mueller needs to protect them because they went way, way out on a limb to spy on Trump during the presidential campaign, and if the full extent of their interference is exposed, it could easily lead to outrage or even criminal charges.

Declassifying documents so the general public can see them renders the FBI attempt to protect those documents moot, and plants a massive egg on the face of everyone involved -- including the intelligence community actors who have so far received relatively little scrutiny, and possibly (if not in these documents, then in later batches) on the political actors. If Trump starts declassifying things, that opens a can of worms that probably can't be closed. All the schemes would be exposed and the information out in public.

That's good for Trump, assuming he's innocent of the Russian collusion charge. That's why Mueller has been desperately digging for something else he can use as leverage. He's nailed a few people for tax issues and rarely-used registration laws, flipped Michael Cohen for more tax issues and got him to plead to a probably-invalid campaign finance crime, but it hasn't given him any real leverage on Trump. And it's Trump he needs leverage on to avoid the declassification scenario.

Judicial Watch

Judicial Watch today released 424 pages of FBI records, including an email revealing that recently fired FBI official Peter Strzok created the initial draft of the October 2016 letter then-FBI director James Comey sent to Congress notifying lawmakers of the discovery of Hillary Clinton emails on the laptop of disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner.

Another email suggests that the FBI had not yet completed its review of Clinton’s emails by the time Comey sent a second letter to Congress on November 6, 2016, reconfirming his belief that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be charged with a crime.

The big deal here is that Strzok initially ignored the evidence on the laptop, then (under pressure from mounting leaks about the existence of the evidence) Comey sent a letter to Congress purporting to clear Hillary of wrongdoing. The way the draft was written (indicating the review was not complete, but they could use the draft if the review supported the conclusions expressed) suggests that the outcome was preordained in a manner remarkably similar to Comey's original speech clearing Clinton. Unless there is a similar draft stating "We found all this new classified material, and Hillary is guilty as sin", then the FBI's bias is clear.

Of course, that bias has already been clear for some time, but this just piles more evidence on top.

I do wonder if the IG had access to this email when writing his report?

Daily Caller

A federal judge declined to give jail time to former Democratic IT aide Imran Awan Tuesday, saying he has “suffered enough” at the hands of politicians “at the highest levels of government.” In addition, the Department of Justice said it did not find any evidence that supported criminal charges.
[...]
The lawyer, former Hillary Clinton aide Chris Gowen, said Imran was motivated by love for his father, who was dying in Virginia when Imran flew to Pakistan. Imran, he said, was in a “panic” to get money to urgently build a charity hospital, described in court as a “women’s shelter.” He described the urgent moves as “securing his father’s legacy.”

And this news drops the day after Cohen pleads and Manafort gets convictions? Bullshit. It's being deliberately buried. Just like the explanation here does not make any sense.

Imran will be allowed to go back to Pakistan with his family, where no law enforcement in the US will be able to ask him what he knows about the Democratic National Committee email leak.

And his lawyer is connected to the Clintons.

Remember the laptop they found while investigating Weiner just a few weeks before the election in 2016? Remember that the laptop contained hundreds of thousands of Hillary emails (as pointed out by the people who found it initially, New York agents)? Remember how the FBI announced, just a few days before the election, that they had examined the laptop and found no new emails, so Hillary was still in the clear?

Apparently, buried in a document release, there is an admission that the FBI had not examined the laptop on November 9th... the day after the election. Which means... when they told the public right before the election that they had examined the laptop and not found anything new... they were lying.

Given the number of emails on the laptop, based on those early reports before the DC office of the FBI got their hands on it, I would be very surprised if there were no new emails at all. Maybe nothing new that was criminal (or at least not immediately obvious as criminal). Maybe nothing new that was classified. But nothing new at all?

Obviously they didn't even bother to look, and now we have proof.

Another interesting point is that the document is a request by Strzok for the FBI's tech guys to examine Huma Abedin's laptop "for evidence of intrusion". By hackers, one presumes. That request has nothing to do with analyzing the emails on the laptop as they relate to the Hillary email investigation. "No evidence of intrusion" does NOT mean that the Hillary emails were secure, or that they did not contain any classified or criminal investigation. It just means no one hacked that particular laptop to get them.

And the final interesting point.

This contradicts Strzok's claims to the IG in his report.

How did the FBI put it when McCabe was fired?

Lack of candor.

UPDATE: Zerohedge has highlighted the relevant sections.

UPDATE: There's actually a second "successor" server. I think we knew this from when the email servers themselves were the scandal, not the investigation of them. The exact significance of the second server is unknown at this time.

Daily Signal

Gohmert asked Strzok about his meeting in 2016 with Frank Rucker and Janette
McMillan, an investigator and lawyer, respectively, for then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough (an Obama appointee).

McCullough sent them to see Strzok, who was the FBI’s deputy assistant director for the Counterintelligence Division, to brief him and three other FBI personnel about an “anomaly” that their forensic analysis had found in Clinton’s server.

According to Gohmert, the inspector general discovered that, with four exceptions, “every single one” of Clinton’s emails—more than 30,000—“were going to an address that was not on the distribution list.”

In other words, according to the information Gohmert received from the intelligence inspector general, something was causing Clinton’s server to send copies of all of her email communications outside of the country “to an unauthorized source that was a foreign entity unrelated to Russia.”

One of the other disturbing bits of information that came out of this exchange was that, according to Gohmert, the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General called Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the Department of Justice, “four times” because it wanted to brief Horowitz about this forensic analysis and this security breach. But, according to Gohmert, Horowitz “never returned the call.”

The fact that Horowitz refused to take calls on this casts his entire report into doubt. His job wasn't to fix the problems, it was yet another modified limited hangout. Drop the information already known, but keep the remedies in-house and out of course by refusing to admit to bias actually influencing anything even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Read the whole thing. Disturbingly, she went to IG Horowitz -- the same man responsible for the recent IG report on the Clinton email investigation -- and he appears to be covering up the results of his investigation.

This is different from the story I recently linked containing 12 things to know about the IG report. Remarkably, both lists include different things. So there are at least 23 things to know about the IG report.

Read the whole thing.

Breitbart

“Peter Strzok should not have a job anywhere near our Justice Department. Rod Rosenstein must be held accountable for his obstructionist conduct,” the North Carolina conservative added. “James Comey should come before Congress and answer for his deeply improper handling of this investigation.”

Meadows concluded in his statement, “After this report, it’s clear we have a long way to go to restore the integrity of and public faith in our Justice Department. Americans deserve better than this.”

We do, but what are the chances we get it?

Daily Wire

A former Navy sailor who was prosecuted by the Obama Administration for taking photos of classified sections of the submarine where he served, and was later pardoned by President Trump, is taking aim at former President Barack Obama, former FBI director James Comey, and the Justice Department, suing them for treating him differently than they treated Hillary Clinton after she left classified information at risk.

As Fox News reports, Kristian Saucier served one year in prison after federal prosecutors argued he had endangered national security by taking photos of the submarine's propulsion system and reactor compartment and then obstructed justice by destroying a laptop and camera. Saucier claimed he wanted the pictures for service mementos. He was pardoned by Trump in March and plans to claim in his lawsuit that Obama and the other defendants treated him with unequal protection under the law.

Saucier's attorney, Ronald Daigle, told Fox News “We’ll highlight the differences in the way Hillary Clinton was prosecuted and how my client was prosecuted. We’re seeking to cast a light on this to show that there’s a two-tier justice system and we want it to be corrected.”

He's not wrong. What the courts will do about it, though, I don't know.

Sara Carter

A recently retired FBI agent, who spoke to this reporter on condition of anonymity due to the current nature of their work, said “when Comey made his announcement four days after Lynch essentially recused herself from the investigation – following the tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton – he broke from 108 years of FBI protocols and regulations.”

“The FBI does not have the power to charge individuals or organizations with crimes,” the former FBI official stated. “FBI agents investigate potiential or suspected crimes and then provide checkable, proof based facts to DOJ prosecutors to allow the DOJ to make the decision to charge an individual based on the premise that they violated the law. The FBI cannot lawfully make that determination, even if the FBI Agent, in this case Comey, was previously a DOJ prosecutor. If any other FBI Agent has done what Comey did and not refer the case to DOJ to make a decision, that agent would be fired from their job and likely be charged with obstruction of justice.”

Well, Comey was fired. He has not been charged with obstruction of justice. That we know of. Yet.

PJMedia

In connection with a discussion about how many people from the FBI and Department should be present during a potential interview of former Secretary Clinton, Page stated in a February 24, 2016 text message to Strzok, “One more thing: she might be our next president. The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear. ...

Page sent similar text messages to McCabe and another FBI employee around the same time, adding that having a larger number in the room “is not operationally necessary” and that “[t]his is as much about reputational protection as anything.”

Sara Carter

The Inspector General did not have “confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up” on new evidence in the Clinton case “was free from bias.” Strzok was assigned to the Midyear investigation, a reference to Clinton’s use of a private server, in August 2015. He was also “responsible for supervising the investigation on a daily basis,” according to the report. Page “was named counsel to then Deputy Director Andrew McCabe in February 2016, and served as his liaison to the Midyear investigative team from February 2016 forward,” according to Horrowitz.

It's like the executive summary and recommendations were written by different people than those investigating the facts... and the former were influenced by the same bias they are supposed to be investigating.

Stephen Hayes quoting IG Report

Witnesses told us, and contemporaneous emails show, that the FBI and Department officials who attended Clinton's interview found that her claim she did not understand the significance of the "(C)" marking stained credibility. Agent 1 stated, "I filed that in the bucket of hard to impossible to believe."

And yet Michael Flynn was hounded out of Washington, forced to sell his house, had his family threatened, and eventually pled guilty... while Clinton was publicly exonerated and her political opponent spied on.

[Hat tip to Ace of Spades]

So, let me get this straight.

The agent who interviewed one of the people at Clinton's residence described their testimony thus: First they never saw the SCIF. Then they looked in while it was being built. Then they removed the trash twice. Then they troubleshooted the secure fax with Hillary. Then they were there every time Hillary did a secure fax... even if he said the truth and didn't have a clearance when handling the secure fax -- ain't noone gonna do shit.

And he was right. No one gonna do shit.

Because the IG cannot connect the evidence of obvious bias to any specific investigative decision... because no one wrote down that they were making a specific investigative decision to screw Trump and elect Hillary. They didn't need to write it down. It was known. It was in the atmosphere. It was pervasive.

[Hat tip Ace of Spades]

We found an email marked Secret on Hillary's email. And we know "foreign actors" obtained access to Hillary's emails, including the one marked Secret. And we know that Hillary's staffers' email accounts were also compromised. But no one followed up, and the exoneration speech by Comey had its wording changed to say it was "possible" foreign actors had accessed that email marked Secret -- instead of "likely".

But there's nothing to see here. No one needs to be held to account for failing to protect classified information even though a foreign actor is likely to have actually accessed that information, which would cause harm to national security.

Oh, and our man Peter Strzok, who was going to "stop" Trump from becoming President, was the one to change the wording of Comey's exoneration speech from "grossly negligent" (the legal standard defined in the law which the FBI is supposed to enforce) to "extremely careless".

But none of the obvious bias can be connected to specific investigative decisions, so it's all hunky-dory.

[Hat tip to Ace of Spades]

IG: FBI offi0cials with no reason to have media contacts accepted bribes from reporters, including meals, tickets to sports events, golf outings, and invitations to private social events. But we won't prosecute anyone for taking bribes or leaking to the media, because that would create the appearance of impropriety. We can just sweep this under the rug with a good, solid slap on the wrist. Probably all these honest, hard-working FBI agents just need to be reminded that we have a policy that forbids bribery, leaking, and coup attempts.

[Hat tip to The Conservative Treehouse]

Clinton's $700,000 donations to Andrew McCabe's wife's campaign, making up more than 40% of her campaign's funds, created an appearance of impropriety, but because McCabe wasn't caught taking bribes to fix the Clinton email investigation until immediately before the election, we'll let him get away with it. This time.

And Kadzik really should have waited until after the investigation had completed the whitewash before trying to get his son a job with the Clinton campaign. That looked really bad.

And oops! McCabe should have stuck to his recusal after he recused himself, but he's not a Republican, so we won't charge him. This time. Maybe next time.

And Kadzik should have known that letting friends of the target of an investigation know that they are going to be questioned about it ahead of time would create an appearance of conflict, but it's only an appearance, not an actual conflict, so we're good so long as he adheres to the terms of his recusal after being caught. Except he didn't? Oh well, no big deal, right?

And [unidentified agent] was all "Viva le Resistance!" while working at the FBI, so he's resisting his boss.

And oh, by the way, the President communicated with Clinton via her insecure email server, using a pseudonym. But none of those emails were classified, because you can't charge the President with mishandling classified material; if he releases it by emailing it to Clinton on her insecure server, it's obviously no longer classified even if it gets sources killed and reveals methods.

And the President lied about it, of course. What, did you expect him to take responsibility for anything?

[Hat tip Ace of Spades]

UPDATE: I thought Viva le Resistance guy was Strzok, but it was an unidentified other agent.

Page: "Please, my love, caress me and reassure me that Trump will never be my president."

Strzok: "Don't worry, my petunia. We'll stop him."

IG: "Because Strzok did not write down how, exactly, he would stop Trump becoming president, we cannot link this clear and obvious evidence of bias to any specific investigative act, therefore, no harm, no foul. However, we recommend a banner on all FBI-owned mobile devices reminding users they have no expectation of privacy while using them, to ensure such an embarrassing incident is never again revealed to the public."

The Conservative Treehouse

Following the traditional process for releasing high-profile reports the Department of Justice – Office of Inspector General (DOJ-OIG) report will be released tomorrow with a briefing to congress and the president happening around Noon, and a public release at 3:00pm. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will brief the President while senior officials from the DOJ will brief congress and their staff.

The 500-page report will cover the DOJ and FBI conduct surrounding the Clinton classified email investigation, and was originally commissioned during the Obama administration to review whether the FBI and DOJ politicized the Clinton investigation and subsequent outcome.

Open question: will the IG report blame the FBI for Clinton losing the election because they were biased against Clinton, or blame the FBI for Clinton losing the election because they were corruptly and obviously in the tank to clear her?