For  months, President Trump and his allies have been salivating over a  report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz,  outlining what they expected would be a tale worthy of a John le Carré  novel. Taking a cue from Trump, Fox News and a constellation of  right-wing media have promised us that the report would reveal the  smoking guns in the deep state’s plot to destroy the president. The  report, a product of Trump’s insistence that his servile Department of  Justice investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, would unleash  the hounds of hell on the Democrats, the Obama administration, and the  intelligence community.
Well,  the report has finally been released, and the results are  underwhelming, to put it mildly. Burn this phrase, lifted directly from  the report, into your mind: <mark class="qr qs ku">“No evidence political bias influenced the decision to open the Russia probe.”</mark>
As  has happened time and again, Trump’s ludicrously overwrought promise —  that this was to be a tentpole of his ongoing (and entirely imaginary)  war against the deep state — was followed by an utterly underwhelming  outcome.
The  vast enterprise of formerly conservative media outlets now dedicated to  trafficking in baroque QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories in defense of  Trump will try their best to polish this turd into a diamond. The  chances are slim, however, that they’ll be able to convince even their  own audience of credulous Trump rubes and conspiracy nuts that this  report means all that much.
Like  a fart in a hurricane, the Horowitz report will soon be lost in the  roiling chaos of a Washington, D.C., in the midst of serial and parallel  crises all caused by the hand of Donald Trump. The 
Ukraine scandal  has exploded into a full-fledged emergency as witness after witness  confirms Trump extorted a political hit job on his domestic rivals from a  foreign power. Republican elected officials are now effectively  mouthpieces of the Kremlin, repeating word for word talking points  written by Vladimir Putin’s propagandists. To top it all off, 
poll numbers show rising support for not just the impeachment of Donald Trump, but for his 
removal from office.
The  lamentations, wailing, and rending of garments on the part of Trump’s  most eager media toadies should be a glory to behold. They committed two  vital errors in making this report central to their defense strategy.
First, they oversold the hell out of it.
We  were promised an earthshaking, absolutely cataclysmic political bomb  that would destroy the deep state forever and trace a line of political  malfeasance from the bowels of the intelligence community right to  Barack Obama’s desk. The QAnon set promised arrests, prosecutions, and  proof of widespread conspiracy to destroy Trump’s campaign. From 
Breitbart News to its gentry cousins at the 
Federalist to a scabrous host of other sites, Horowitz was a god-tier final boss against the deep state.
We  were promised a shocking set of revelations that would shatter the  abuse of the FISA process and prove, once and for all, that Trump’s  innocent, clean, totally aboveboard campaign of professional and  dedicated patriots who would never, ever even contemplate any kind of  contact with Russian spies, mobsters, and oligarchs. We would finally  learn the truth about the informants and sources the FBI placed inside  the campaign. (Spoiler: There weren’t any.)
For  two years, we were told that Trump foreign policy aide Carter Page,  campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and bestie General Mike Flynn were as  clean as the driven snow, mere targets of a monstrous, out-of-control  conspiracy directed from the Oval Office.
Wait, we were told. It’s coming. Trust Horowitz. Trust 
William Barr.
Far  from being a sweeping attack on their entire Trump-Russia  investigation, Trump fluffers will be disappointed to find that the  Carter Page FISA operation was — wait for it — entirely justified.
FISA  abuse — a term most often used by people with exactly zero familiarity  with or even knowledge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act  Court — seems to be almost entirely a fiction generated by the lavish,  paranoid fantasies of the Trump gang. The phony “FISA abuse” trope is  the central pillar on which so many of their denials rest.
One  of the most common claims of Trump’s “FISA abuse” screech squad is that  the famed Steele dossier was the origin point of the investigation. The  Horowitz report puts to bed that spurious claim.
It  wasn’t Obama. It wasn’t a DOJ or FBI cabal of secret liberals out to  destroy Trump. It was U.S. ally Australia blowing in a warning that  someone was dangling Hillary Clinton’s emails to Papadopoulos in London.
While  the report scolds Peter Strozk and Lisa Page for their text-message  exchanges, it doesn’t find that their dislike of Trump had any material  effect on the investigation. This finding puts the lie to Trump — and  his defenders’ — assertions that they were the point persons in a  conspiracy against him: “In this review, we found that, while Lisa Page  attended some of the discussions regarding the opening of the  investigations, she did not play a role in the decision to open  Crossfire Hurricane or the four individual cases. We further found that  while Strzok was directly involved in the decisions to open Crossfire  Hurricane and the four individual cases, he was not the sole, or even  the highest-level, decision maker as to any of those matters.”
Oopsie.
Worse for Trump’s narrative, the misconduct was overshadowed 
entirely  by the crucial determinations that the FISA applications for the  surveillance of Page were proper and that the renewals of the  surveillance warrants were justified. (Horowitz did find 17 “
significant errors or omissions”  in the application process for Page’s warrants. But — more importantly —  no evidence that “political bias or improper motivation” was opening  the investigation.) Page wasn’t a target because he was a member of  Trump’s campaign; he was a target because he kept popping up in the  company of Russian intelligence officers.
This  was happening, of course, as the rest of the U.S. intelligence  community was sounding the alarm over a sweeping Russian information  warfare and propaganda campaign directed at the 2016 election—and in  favor of one candidate: Donald Trump.
While  those red flags (or red banners, if you’ll pardon a Soviet-era joke)  also extended to Trump aides, allies, friends, and Trump himself, the  report also detonates another Trump lie: that the FISA coverage was  broadly targeting his entire senior campaign staff. Mike Flynn’s move  from Defense Intelligence Agency director to Putin dinner guest just may  have been a legitimate cause for concern. Paul Manafort’s longtime role  as oligarch fluffer for pro-Kremlin forces just might have been a  reason to raise alarms. George Papadopolous might have been the loosest  of cannons. But in all those cases, despite Trump’s many claims, the IG  reports that none of them were under FISA warrants.
“FBI  and [National Security Division] officials told us that the Crossfire  Hurricane team ultimately did not seek FISA surveillance of  Papadopoulos, and we are aware of no information indicating that the  team requested or seriously considered FISA surveillance of Manafort or  Flynn,” the report reads.
For  some time, the report has been in the hands of Attorney General Bill  Barr, who could weaponize a grocery list for Donald Trump, and still,  there’s no sign that Team Trump is holding more than a pair of twos. If  Bill Barr can’t turn this chicken **** into chicken salad, no one can.  It comes as no surprise to read Barr’s spin of the report — spin that,  as expected, reflects a Trumpian distortion of the facts: “The Inspector  General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive  investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of  suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps  taken,” he said.
Formerly  conservative publications now dedicated in varying degrees to serving  Trump and trafficking in lurid conspiracy nonsense spent a year  breathlessly awaiting this nothingburger. They expected it would be  laden with a heavy cargo of ammunition against the hated deep state,  full of smoking-gun proof that the targeting of Trump’s associates was a  political hit directed from the Oval Office of a certain Kenyan Muslim  socialist sleeper-agent president with a suspicious middle name.
Of course, Trump supporters are moving on to the next showstopper, made-up investigation by U.S. Attorney 
John Durham. That’s the 
real killer. Dunham will 
finally bring the wrongdoers to justice. Uh-huh.
The  Horowitz report, far from fulfilling the fantasies of the Trump squad,  fell flat, showing that the deep state wasn’t trying to do Trump in, but  rather were merely doing their jobs. Trump’s attacks on the FBI  officials turned out to be — like most of Trump’s attacks — lies,  smears, and distractions.
The intelligence community, the FBI, the FISA courts, and the DOJ weren’t attacking Trump.
They were protecting us.