The Inspector General's Report: In Sum

So, in short, the Inspector General's report found:

1. The FBI followed existing procedures in opening its investigation into the Trump campaign, although those procedures should probably be tightened to require DOJ approval;
2. The FBI followed existing procedures and appears to have acted appropriately in doing FBI file and open source investigation on campaign members, asking other government agencies for information, and opening an investigation on four members who seemed genuinely suspicious;
3. The FBI followed existing procedures in having confidential informants from outside of the Trump campaign talk Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, but those policies are incredible slack and should be tightened;
4. The FBI very properly did not insert any informants into the Trump campaign itself;
5. The FBI was not wrong to talk to Christopher Steele and investigate his leads, despite his working for Trump's political rivals (although it found serious problems in the nature of their relationship); however
6. The FBI seriously mismanaged the FISA application on Carter Page, using uncorroborated information from a dubious source and failing to include important exculpatory information. 

Reading between the lines two other things become apparent.  First the investigation came up dry.  It failed to find any evidence of a link between the Trump campaign and Russia.  This has led many Trump supporters to argue that the investigation should never have been launched.  But this ignores two things.  First, investigations do sometimes pursue false leads.  It is only in hindsight that we know which investigations will and will not turn up anything of importance..

Second, and relatedly, there wasn't much of an investigation.  Operation Crossfire Hurricane basically consisted of an open source search, a search of FBI files, inquiry to other agencies, several interviews by confidential informants, looking into the Steele Dossier, and a FISA warrant on Carter Page.  Really, that is rather thin.

Of course, the reason that Crossfire Hurricane was so skimpy was that it was operating under a serious handicap.  It had to conceal its existence.  That problem is endemic to all counter intelligence operations, but it was particularly acute in the case of Crossfire Hurricane because the target of the investigation was so high profile.  Actions like subpoenaing records might be doable in a lower profile case but would be detected what the target was a U.S. presidential campaign.  Crossfire Hurricane was therefore cut off from normal investigative techniques, like subpoenaing records and openly interviewing witnesses.  

Thus the story of the Trump investigation does not end with Crossfire Hurricane, but moves on to the Robert Mueller investigation.  The Robert Mueller investigation was able to use more open investigative techniques, but it, too, had a disadvantage.  The Mueller investigation was a criminal investigation.  That meant that it had to reach its conclusions based on evidence that would be admissible in court, and had to refrain from assumptions that, though reasonable, lacked an adequate evidentiary basis.  Although the Mueller Report did not find anything that could be charged as a criminal conspiracy, it did find disturbing happenings, in particular, that Paul Manafort was regularly sending polling data to a probably Russian spy, and that Michael Flynn was cruising the dark web for Hillary Clinton's deleted e-mails, unconcerned with the possibility that he might be talking to Russian spies.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, unhampered the the constraints of a criminal investigation, looking into these allegations in greater detail and did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, but found many decidedly disturbing event.  If this were a spy movie or mystery novel, the investigation would not have shifted from Crossfire Hurricane to Robert Mueller or the Senate Intelligence Committee.  Instead, the FBI, with the same personnel, would have been released from their constraints and completed the investigation.  

For me to complete the novel/movie, I should next read and post about the Senate Intelligence Committee report.  But I don't think I will do that just yet.  Why not?  Because right now Russia is gearing up for war on Ukraine.  We are hearing an endless drumbeat of reports that war could start any day.  In fact, at least some reports set the date as Wednesday, February 16.  And in Ukrainian time, it is already Wednesday, February 16, so the war could start, not just any day, but any hour.  A Russian invasion will not lead to WWIII because the US has ruled out military intervention.  But it will start an economic world war, with disastrous consequences for all parties.  Somehow everything else looks trivial by comparison.  So I do not expect to post on other topics until we see how things shake out.