The real problems the inspector general found

“I WAS surprised by the statement,” Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. We could think of a few more ways he could have felt — frustrated, dismayed, outraged — at the spin that senior Justice Department officials put on his long-awaited report. The review of the department’s investigation of President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian election meddling found that the probe was properly launched and that there was no indication of political bias. It also found that the FBI breached protocol in the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process. That deserves further discussion — but not, as Attorney General William P. Barr has done, to dignify the president’s “deep state” conspiracy theories.

Almost simultaneously with the report’s release Monday, Mr. Barr dismissed and minimized Mr. Horowitz’s findings — or, at least, the ones that failed to paint the FBI as a rogue agency nursing an anti-Trump agenda. “The FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” he said. The next day he raised “the possibility that there was bad faith.”

U.S. Attorney John Durham, whom Mr. Barr handpicked to conduct yet another investigation of the Russia probe, piled on, saying that “we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened” and implied that he had uncovered new evidence that might shift the picture. This was the statement that surprised Mr. Horowitz. Its innuendo left unanswered whether Mr. Durham has turned up something new.