“Shoddy” seems more correct.

https://www.weeklystandard.com/eric-felten/what-we-can-learn-from-carter-page-and-russias-bumbling-spies

“In late January 2015, Attorney General Eric Holder and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara announced charges against three Russians living in New York and believed to be spies: Evgeny Buryakov, Igor Sporyshev, and Victor Podobnyy. Each had a thin cover job: Buryakov was ostensibly an employee at the Manhattan branch of a Russian bank, Vnesheconombank; Sporyshev was a trade representative for the Russian Federation; Podobnyy was an attaché to the Russian mission at the United Nations. In reality the men were all agents of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR.

How did American authorities know the men were spies–well, other than the fact that Sporyshev and Podobnyy, with their phony-baloney diplomatic jobs, all but had the word “spy” tattooed on their foreheads? There was incontrovertible evidence: They were on tape talking extensively about their spy business.
…
The savvy reader will by now know where this is going. The analyst with the energy company was actually an undercover FBI employee. Together with the “purported industry analysis” documents, the binders contained hidden recording devices. Sporyshev “took the binders to, among other places, the Residentura.” The G-men listened in from March 2012 through September 2014. What a beautiful piece of tradecraft, getting Russian agents to bug their own cone of silence!
…
Which brings us to the implications that have been missed all along.

The first is that, for all we’ve been hearing about Russia’s attempted interference in the 2016 election, everything we know about Russia’s hobbled espionage capabilities in the United States–and we know quite a lot, given the FBI’s listening device that operated for years in the heart of the New York Residentura–suggests that Vladimir Putin’s regime would have a hard time influencing a dog-catcher’s election in Poughkeepsie.

The second is a sort of dog-that-didn’t-bark affair. Remember the dossier, written by ex-British-spy Christopher Steele and paid for by the Clinton campaign, the document that did so much to launch the narrative that Trump colluded with Russia? The Steele dossier alleged that Trump had conspired with Putin for five to eight years, and that the operation was handled by “Russian diplomatic staff in key cities such as New York, Washington DC and Miami.” But during the time of this supposed conspiracy, the FBI was listening in to the conversations of the very Russian spies posing as diplomatic staff in New York. If there had been a Trump-Kremlin connection being operated out of New York, wouldn’t one expect the topic to have come up in the discussions among Russian intelligence officers in the supposedly secure safe-room at the Residentura? Would the spy trio have been so bored and disheartened if they had been running a secret asset who just happened to be one of the richest celebrities in town?

That said, there are limits to what is publicly known. The complete transcripts collected by the FBI were never released–just enough, and then some, to establish that Buryakov, Sporyshev, and Podobnyy were spies. But we do know that the FBI acted on the names that turned up in the spies’ conversation. When Podobnyy told Sporyshev in 2013 how he planned to feed Carter Page “empty promises,” the FBI promptly went and had a conversation with Page to warn him he was being targeted. Is it credible that Donald Trump’s name would have turned up and been ignored by the FBI? Is it possible that Bharara would have come across references to Trump in the course of a high-profile prosecution and not done anything with the information?
Then again, maybe Buryakov, Sporyshev, and Podobnyy talked at length about working Trump after all. Perhaps the FBI has just forgotten they have some such unreleased recordings buried in the file. Or maybe the bureau has already identified the relevant tapes and turned the transcripts over to the special counsel’s team. But if Mueller did have such tapes, would he have sat on them for so long?

If there is any mention of Trump in the Residentura bootlegs, let’s hope the FBI digs them out and the special counsel brings them forward, sooner rather than later, so that the whole collusion question can be answered.

Absent those possibilities, what are we to take away from the lack of any reference to Trump in the unguarded conversations of top Russian spies in New York? Is it unreasonable to take it as an indication the tale of a Trump/Russia conspiracy is not to be believed?”

“D.C. bureaucrats used to have “The Al Kamen Rule” for email. He was a WaPo columnist who ran leaks, rumors, and scuttlebutt. The rule was, never send an email if you didn’t want to see it in Al Kamen’s column the next day.

Now, consider the five agents who sent hundreds of highly political texts, including openly discussing affecting the 2016 election. FBI agents. On FBI devices. Many, many times. And these are just five agents the OIG investigated. This tells me that a) They didn’t care who saw their messages, or thought it didn’t matter. And thus b) there was an open, explicit culture at the FBI to bash Trump, bash his supporters, and consider his election all but illegitimate. Deeply, deeply, deeply troubling.”

“There are many facts and details regarding both investigations that still need to come to light. In the meantime, it is becoming increasingly difficult not to conclude that the Russia probe was, at least in part, an operation designed to control the inevitable damage that would have afflicted the Clinton campaign had her emails surfaced. Of particular concern, it seems, was the email showing that she and Obama had communicated over an unsecured server while she was on Russian territory.

The identity of the foreign adversary that serves as the entire premise of the Trump investigation was suppressed in the Clinton probe. It seems important to know why.”

“Tonight I will focus on just one point.

The point crystallizes in a passage that starts on page 328 of the report. Immediately preceding this passage, the IG discusses reasons offered by FBI headquarters personnel for the delay in processing the Anthony Weiner laptop for evidence related to the Clinton emails “matter.”

FBI officials had been aware of the laptop’s potential significance since around 28 September 2016, at the latest, but it took until the end of October for the Bureau to decide to reopen the Clinton matter because of the laptop. Announcing that they were reopening the case, only days before the November election, couldn’t help looking political, and having potential political consequences.

One of the chief reasons offered by FBI officials for this timeline was that the Russia-Trump investigation took priority. If you’re looking for reasons to excuse the FBI for its behavior, that might sound superficially plausible.

But the IG report doesn’t just leave it there. In the passage starting on page 328, it goes on to make — in mild, precise language — a very telling point. The FBI is a big organization, and there were plenty of options for processing both cases with adequate attention and manpower for each one. Yet the FBI didn’t do that.
…
But the real story here, in my view, is the bigger picture point that both of the cases — Clinton’s emails and the Russia investigation — were being very tightly controlled by the same small group of individuals.

That’s a big tell. It’s a tell that the priority driving everything was political. Tight control of information and investigative discretion, by the same individuals, means politics. It’s how you arrange things when you don’t want neutral, good-government priorities to accidentally kick in.

It almost certainly would have been no strain on capabilities or resources to run the Hillary investigation in New York, or to run the Russia investigation from the Washington Field Office (which has a long history of handling such cases). From some routinely-considered standpoints, it would have been better. The FBI and DOJ headquarters offices would have had more objectivity in a supervisory role (and certainly more credibility as witnesses afterward, if they weren’t policing themselves in the observance of their rules for things like receiving foreign human intelligence, and processing FISA requests).

But that’s not how the cases were handled. They weren’t handled as if the priority was to reach good-faith conclusions and end up with actionable evidence, if such evidence existed. They were handled as if the tools of law enforcement could, and probably would, have political impact – and as if that, itself, was the point.

Doing that was a choice, and the case assignment and staffing merely demonstrate that it was a choice made in advance. Forget Strzok and Page. In terms of the FBI’s major muscle movements – its most basic procedural decisions – the question of whether it was acting from political motives in 2016 is settled at this point.”

“The exchanges continue into page 418, and that’s where we see two arresting messages from FBI Attorney 2.
(the insert won’t copy but is summarized below)

Attorney 2 is worried that his name is prominent in the Bureau’s documents about the investigation of the Trump campaign staff.”

And yet, the IG never again mentions that peculiar motive for acting on bias, or quizzes Attorney 2 about it.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/06/cartoon-of-the-day-2.php

McCarthy is brilliant. He was one of the first post-9/11 writers I used as a reliable legal guide. I believe the first time I read his work was this article from April of 2004, and I was extremely impressed by his ability to clearly explain things that were difficult to understand, as well as the scope of his knowledge.

These days I’m also astounded at how quickly he turns out these long, lucid, informative pieces.