IG Report On FISA Abuse Now Likely Delayed Until Fall

John Ratcliffe gave a specific target date for the release of the report: September 2 (Labor Day.)

Ratcliffe spoke on Fox News about this and also gave some insight as to why Mueller refused to talk about Obama's role in the Russia investigation during his hearing.

Watch what he had to say here:

The Washington Examiner has more details on the new timeline for the end of the FISA abuse investigation:

A new timeline has emerged in recent days for Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz's investigation into alleged surveillance abuses by the DOJ and the FBI.

          

Whereas Attorney General William Barr predicted earlier this year that the watchdog's investigation would be finished by May or early June, now lawmakers are pointing to the early fall.

          

Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures that he “expects that report later this fall.”

          

                                

          

His colleague John Ratcliffe, who has spoken to Horowitz, gave a more specific target. The Texas congressman told Fox News' Bret Baier on Wednesday, "I think that we will get the IG's report probably sometime right after Labor Day." Labor Day is Sept. 2.

          

Further solidifying the prediction was a RealClearInvestigations report about former FBI Director James Comey having an inside man at the White House, feeding the bureau information about President Trump and his aides in 2017. That report also set a release date sometime in September.

          

The delay in Horowitz's work was reportedly due to his team's two-day meeting with Steele in person in London in early June, during President Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom. Investigators found Steele's information credible enough to warrant extending their investigation.

As for more reasons why the investigation is being delayed, Paul Sperry shared some more breaking news on Twitter: 

Regarding evidence that Comey had an inside man at the White House, Real Clear Investigations detailed:

It is one of the most enduring and consequential mysteries of the Trump-Russia investigation: Why did former FBI Director James Comey refuse to say publicly what he was telling President Trump in private -- that Trump was not the target of an ongoing probe?

That refusal ignited a chain of events that has consumed Washington for more than two years – including Comey’s firing by Trump, the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and ongoing claims that Trump obstructed justice. 

Now an answer is emerging. Sources tell RealClearInvestigations that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will soon file a report with evidence indicating that Comey was misleading the president. Even as he repeatedly assured Trump that he was not a target, the former director was secretly trying to build a conspiracy case against the president, while at times acting as an investigative agent.

Two U.S. officials briefed on the inspector general’s investigation of possible FBI misconduct said Comey was essentially “running a covert operation against” the president, starting with a private “defensive briefing” he gave Trump just weeks before his inauguration. They said Horowitz has examined high-level FBI text messages and other communications indicating Comey was actually conducting a “counterintelligence assessment” of Trump during that January 2017 meeting in New York. 

In addition to adding notes of his meetings and phone calls with Trump to the official FBI case file, Comey had an agent inside the White House who reported back to FBI headquarters about Trump and his aides, according to other officials familiar with the matter.

Although Comey took many actions on his own, he was not working in isolation. One focus of Horowitz’s inquiry is the private Jan. 6, 2017, briefing Comey gave the president-elect in New York about material in the Democratic-commissioned dossier compiled by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Reports of that meeting were used days later by BuzzFeed, CNN and other outlets as a news hook for reporting on the dossier’s lascivious and unsubstantiated claims. 

Comey’s meeting with Trump took place one day after the FBI director met in the Oval Office with President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to discuss how to brief Trump — a meeting attended by National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who would soon go to work for CNN. 

In his recently published memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” Comey denied having "a counterintelligence case file open on [Trump],” though he qualified the denial by adding this was true only in the “literal” sense.  He also twice denied investigating Trump, under oath, in congressional testimony.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who has written extensively on the Trump-Russia probe as a columnist for National Review, said that just because the president’s name was not put on a file or a surveillance warrant does not mean the Comey FBI was not investigating him. “They were hoping to surveil him incidentally, and they were trying to make a case on him,” McCarthy said. “The real reason Comey did not want to repeat publicly the assurances he made to Trump privately is that these assurances were misleading. The FBI strung Trump along, telling him he was not a suspect while structuring the investigation in accordance with the reality that Trump was the main subject."

But, former FBI counterintelligence agent and lawyer Mark Wauck said, the FBI lacked legal grounds to treat Trump as a suspect. “They had no probable cause against Trump himself for ‘collusion’ or espionage,” he said. “They were scrambling to come up with anything to hang a hat on, but had found nothing.”

What remains unclear is why Comey would take such extraordinary steps against a sitting president. The Mueller report concluded there was no basis for the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theories. Comey himself was an early skeptic of the Steele dossier -- the opposition research memos paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign that were the road map of collusion theories – which he dismissed as “salacious and unverified.”

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What will the report reveal when it's finally released?

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