If Congressman Trey Gowdy is to be believed, and I see no reason not to believe him, this should be an interesting week in Washington. According to Gowdy, Speaker Paul Ryan read the riot act to the DOJ and FBI  on Friday night about the Bureau's stonewalling and foot dragging in the face of longstanding subpoenas issued by the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. If the subpoenas are not complied with, Gowdy warned that the full constitutional powers of the House will be employed by week's end. It is clear that Gowdy was not just talking about holding people in contempt. Gowdy's comments are significant, because he has been one of the few House Republicans to consistently support the work of Bob Mueller and to give the benefit of the doubt to the Bureau regarding the origins of the Russian investigation. This has often put him on the outs with the many Trump shills on the GOP side. What apparently pushed Gowdy over the edge was the Horowitz Report's revelation of Peter Strzok's text response to Lisa Page that "we'll stop" Trump from being elected President. Astonishingly, it appears that this text had not been provided to the House prior to the release of the Horowitz Report. I suspect as well that Gowdy was enraged to read in the Report that the Bureau, with the active involvement of Deputy Director McCabe, sat on its knowledge of the Weiner laptop materials, even keeping it from the DOJ prosecutors who had been involved in the Clinton email server investigation (dubbed "Midyear Exam"), until alarmed officials in the SDNY U.S. Attorney's Office tipped off an attorney at Main Justice. It is clear that at the time Strzok was leading and ramping up the Russia investigation, he and a large group of DC FBI officials were suppressing the discovery of 347,000 potentially relevant emails on Weiner's laptop. This is why even the rather tame Horowitz Report "did not have confidence that Strzok's decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the Midyear-related investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop was free from bias." But make no mistake about it, Strzok did not act alone. As many as 39 FBI officials were likely to have participated in a September 28, 2016 secure video teleconference (SVTC) in which the discovery of 141,000 emails potentially relevant to Midyear Exam was discussed. (McCabe was informed of the 347,000 figure later that evening.) This was an FBI conspiracy of silence. The irony is that the FBI's attempt to suppress the Weiner emails almost certainly aided Trump's electoral victory. If the emails had been processed in a timely fashion, without publicity, their ultimate irrelevance would have been established prior to the election and Comey would not have needed to make the damaging announcement that he was reopening the Midyear investigation. It will be doubly ironic if there were wholly legitimate reasons to open the Russia investigation, but the FBI's misguided efforts to hide its own mistakes ends up tainting and derailing the entire project. Byron York reports here on the growing House GOP suspicion that the FBI is hiding even bigger bombshells.

(wisenberg)