Danielle McLaughlin

In testimony on Capitol Hill this week, the Inspector General of the FBI, Michael Horowitz, laid out the results of an 18-month investigation into aspects of the bureau’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election.

Some of what the watchdog found was not pretty for the FBI, one of the world’s pre-eminent domestic investigative agencies.

Horowitz and his team conducted 170 interviews with more than 100 witnesses, and reviewed more than a million pages of documents, including emails and text messages.

The investigation concerned several facets of the Russia probe: the decision to open the Russia counterintelligence investigation; the FBI’s relationship with the author of the ‘‘Steele Dossier,’’ former MI6 agent Christopher Steele; the validity of four applications to a secret court to monitor former Trump adviser Carter Page; the conduct of certain Department of Justice officials close to Steele; and the FBI’s use of undercover agents.

The questions with the biggest political impact were whether the probe’s opening and conduct were tainted by anti-Trump bias, and whether the surveillance of Page was properly obtained.

Despite years of complaints from the president and his allies that the Russia investigation was rigged and staffed with ‘‘never Trumpers’’, Horowitz found that there was no political bias or improper purpose motivating the conduct of the FBI.

The predicate for opening the investigation – a Trump aide’s disclosure to an Australian diplomat that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton – was found to be legally sufficient.

Despite Trump’s allegation of ‘‘spying’’ on his campaign, the watchdog found no evidence that the FBI tried to place human sources in the Trump campaign, recruit members of the campaign as human sources, or ask human sources to report on the campaign.

Horowitz also found that the FBI’s scrutiny of Trump advisers Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and others as the investigation continued was similarly untainted by political prejudice.

But that is where the ‘‘good’’ news for the FBI ended.

Horowitz’s review of the FBI’s applications to a special court convened under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) found a litany of mistakes and omissions.

Horowitz found 17 distinct problems connected to the first application establishing the surveillance of Page, starting in September 2016, and the three renewals submitted by the FBI and approved by the FISA court.

One of the worst offenders was a low-level FBI lawyer who doctored an email to make it look like Page had no prior relationship with the CIA – a fact which, if known, may have led the FISA court to deny surveillance entirely.

Horowitz revealed that the FBI knew that Page had had operational contact with the CIA between 2008 and 2013, and had provided information to the CIA about his contacts with certain Russian intelligence officers.

In short, Page was working with the US government, and likely not against it.

Another serious failure was that in January 2017, the FBI learned that the Steele Dossier – which detailed alleged contacts between Trump, his campaign, associates, and Russia – was unreliable. Not because its origin was political (the FBI knew that, and frequently received information with an implicit ‘‘bias’’), but because there were concerns about the reliability of Steele’s sources, as well as contradictory information later obtained from them.

Despite the fact that the dossier was a fundamental part of the three subsequent FISA renewals, the FBI did not disclose these findings to the FISA court.

Horowitz said he could not rule out political bias as a motivation for some of these serious issues. Who could blame him?

These findings identified ‘‘serious performance failures’’, according to Horowitz, and his 40 recommendations to create safeguards against the abuses of process found have been accepted by FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Some of Horowitz’s findings are a political ‘‘win’’ for Trump and his supporters, who have long railed against the Russia probe. But, apropos of the president, his team has already blown it up into something it is not.

‘‘They spied on me’’, Trump tweeted. No, they did not.

The president persists in his ‘‘deep state’’ myth, seeking to convince anyone who will listen that every single institution comprising the US democratic system is out to get him.

It’s worth considering that Horowitz reviewed a million documents, including thousands of text messages that were never expected by their authors or recipients to see the light of day.

The conclusion that there was no personal or institutional bias in the opening and operation of the investigation into his campaign’s Russia ties is robust, to say the least.

The president maintains that the Russia investigation was a ‘‘hoax’’, despite the fact that all 17 intelligence agencies in the US have concluded that Russia did indeed meddle in the 2016 election to help Trump and hurt Clinton.

Recently, sworn testimony from former advisers Steve Bannon and Rick Gates revealed that thencandidate Trump was in close contact with Wikileaks conduit Roger Stone, and in July 2106 was advised by Stone that WikiLeaks, with its trove of Democrats’ emails stolen by Russia, was about to dump more emails, hurting the Clinton campaign.

Finally, the Trump campaign constantly lied about contacts with Russian officials both before and after the 2016 election. The Moscow Project has counted 272 contacts between the Trump camp and Russian operatives, 38 of which were actual meetings.

The Mueller report investigated and revealed many of these contacts, and the extent to which the Trump team sought to cover them up: ‘‘The investigation established that several individuals affiliated with the Trump campaign lied to the office, and to Congress, about their interactions with Russian-affiliated individuals and related matters. Those lies materially impaired the investigation of Russian election interference.’’

It’s one thing to be vindicated by the Horowitz report. It’s quite another to lie about what it found, furthering the damage already done by the men and women who let the FBI down.

Where to from here? There is more to investigate.

Horowitz testified this week that his office is still looking into alleged leaks from the FBI’s New York field office in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election.

Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani is understood to have improperly received information about potentially new emails discovered on a Clinton aide’s laptop. This leak forced then-FBI director James Comey to announce that he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s emails two weeks before the 2016 election. Comey found no further wrongdoing, but the damage was done.

Both Democrats and Republicans have found plenty to crow about, and plenty to complain about, in the Horowitz report. Such is the nature of politics.

But did anyone involved come out of this unscathed? Horowitz says no. ‘‘The activities we found here don’t vindicate anybody who touched this,’’ he said.

Both Democrats and Republicans have found plenty to crow about, and plenty to complain about, in the Horowitz report.

Danielle McLaughlin is the Sunday Star-Times’ US correspondent. She is a lawyer, author, and political and legal commentator, appearing frequently on US and New Zealand TV and radio. She is also an ambassador for #ChampionWomen, which aims to encourage respectful, diverse, and thoughtful conversations. Follow Danielle on Twitter at @MsDMcLaughlin.