For five days now, the shocking report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, detailing extensive political bias at the FBI, has dominated Washington, DC. As I write this, the Senate Judiciary Committee just started a hearing with Horowitz and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

We will monitor the proceedings and report any significant developments tomorrow. But here’s the context in which the hearing is taking place.

Over the weekend, interested parties continued poring over the Horowitz report with a magnifying glass, looking for additional details that may have been missed in the initial 48 hours of news coverage. 

For example, the culture of leaks at the FBI has many people shaking their heads. Consider this excerpt from the Horowitz report:

“Second, although FBI policy strictly limits the employees who are authorized to speak to the media, we found that this policy appeared to be widely ignored during the period we reviewed. We identified numerous FBI employees, at all levels of the organization and with no official reason to be in contact with the media, who were nevertheless in frequent contact with reporters. The large number of FBI employees who were in contact with journalists during this time period impacted our ability to identify the sources of leaks.”

Among several documented examples, Horowitz found that one top FBI official had communicated 26 times with one reporter and seven times with another reporter.

Here’s something else that has been largely overlooked by most media coverage: Obama lied to the American people, and James Comey covered for him.

During a March 2015 interview with CBS News, then-President Obama was asked when he learned that Hillary Clinton had been using an unofficial email account for government business. Obama answered, “The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.”

That was not true. Buried in a footnote on page 89 of the Horowitz report is this nugget:

“FBI analysts and Prosecutor 2 told us that former President Barack Obama was one of the 13 individuals with whom Clinton had direct contact using her clintonemail.com account.”

This may be one of the major reasons Comey and others held their fire when it came to prosecuting Hillary Clinton. Obama obviously knew that Hillary was not using an official State.gov email address because he communicated with her on her private account. But the FBI wasn’t about to go after the president (at least not one beloved by the left-wing media).

On page four of the report’s executive summary, Horowitz writes that then-FBI Director Comey edited out a reference to Obama’s knowledge of Clinton’s private email use.

In Comey’s first draft of his July 2016 Clinton exoneration statement, Comey wrote that the FBI was concerned about possible foreign hacking because Clinton and President Obama had exchanged messages “while in the territory of a foreign adversary.”

Horowitz writes: “This reference later was changed to ‘another senior government official,’ and ultimately was omitted.”

Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, which jeopardized our national security, went straight to the top. Barack Obama knew about it. He lied about it. And the FBI director covered for him.

Kudos, once again, to Andrew McCarthy, whose coverage of this scandal has been prescient.

“Hell to Pay”

The Horowitz report appears to have injected some spine into certain Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, and it should. It is a damning indictment against an FBI riddled with political bias, and Republican leaders FINALLY appear ready to do something about it.

Justice Department leaders held another late-night Friday meeting with Speaker Paul Ryan, attempting to justify their continued stonewalling. But Ryan ordered the Justice Department to comply with congressional requests.

During an interview on Fox News, House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy described the meeting this way:

“And [Speaker Ryan] made it very clear. There’s going to be action on the floor of the House this week if the FBI and DOJ do not comply with our subpoena request. So [Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein, [FBI Director] Chris Wray, you were in the meeting. You understood him just as clearly as I did. We’re going to get compliance or the House of Representatives is going to use its full arsenal of constitutional weapons to gain compliance.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes echoed Gowdy’s remarks. In a separate Fox News appearance, Nunes said:

“The deadline is this week. If documents do not begin to be turned over tomorrow and a clear way and path forward for everything else is not clear here in the next couple days, there’s going to be hell to pay by Wednesday morning…”

Asked if that meant the possibility of impeachment for top Justice and FBI officials, Nunes answered, “Absolutely. I’ve been there for a while now.”

Another Entrapment Attempt?

The Washington Post has been hyping reports that Roger Stone, described as a “longtime confidant of Donald Trump,” met in May 2016 with a Russian who was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The Russian, named “Henry Greenberg,” wanted $2 million in exchange for the information. According to Stone, the brief meeting was a “waste of time.”

But here’s what the media are glossing over: “Mr. Greenberg,” whose real name is Henry Oknyansky, worked for the FBI for 17 years.

The Stone contact, just like Stefan Halper, appears to be another FBI attempt to entrap the Trump campaign.

Virtually every contact that anyone points to as evidence of collusion with Russia somehow seems to involve the FBI or Fusion GPS or people connected to Hillary Clinton.

The Trump/Russia collusion investigation is really starting to look like a big sting operation with virtually no connection at all to Vladimir Putin. In fact, the only real collusion here seems to be between the Clinton campaign and the FBI.

This Just In…

A new Gallup poll finds President Trump’s approval rating (45%) is up 10 points in seven months, and at the highest level since the beginning of his presidency. Gallup notes that the president’s approval rating among independent voters shot up seven points in the past week.