This article is just weird. I assume the basic facts are correct—someone in the IG’s office spotted something in HRC’s email headers that looked suspicious and notified FBI; now IG sources have passed this on to the Caller. Fine. dailycaller.com/2018/08/27/chi…
But it's borderline inconceivable that nobody else in the chain spotted something that overt first. & if it were actually evidence of an intrusion, would require a whole lot of people to be either mindbogglingly incompetent or engaged in the world’s riskiest, stupidest cover-up.
Like, you have to believe that the IG found this in 2015, and then everyone down the chain at FBI/DOJ either *just ignored it* or chose to risk their careers by repeatedly making false claims the IG could have exposed at any time.
My best guess about what’s going on here is that someone at the OIG in 2015 did spot something that looked suspicious to them & passed it along, had misunderstood what they were seeing, and dropped it after a patient explanation from some forensic analyst at FBI.
Said patient explanation possibly delivered by phone so as not to create a written record of someone at FBI giving an adult professional a remedial IT primer.
Then in 2018, new staffers serving under the new IG notice a record of the original referral, also don’t really understand what they’re looking at (apparently they think CC stands for “courtesy copy”?) & run to Gohmert/the Caller breathlessly declaring they’ve found a cover-up.
Obviously I’m speculating. But “IG staffers thought they’d found a hack FBI and Clinton’s IT people all missed, but were mistaken” sounds more parsimonious than “IG staff spotted a real hack and dozens of people covered it up at substantial professional risk to themselves."
There’s not a ton of indication that the direct sources on this have the technical background to assess whatever was in the headers. There’s a former intel official with “expertise in cybersecurity issue” who was “briefed on the matter” & gives a comment.
And while I assume the IG has some techies on staff, I’d expect most of the auditors on something like this to be lawyers, not network intrusion experts. So if I had to wager, I’d bet on the “whatever IG found wasn’t what they thought” explanation.
If it’s not—if the IG had really found what they thought they had found—it would in fact be a huge story. Indeed, so huge it would be equally incredible that it hadn’t blown up long ago.
