One of the most difficult questions forensic psychiatrists and psychologists are asked is to speculate about a defendant's mental condition at the time of the crime of which he is accused.  A defense attorney, often when he knows that his client is going to be convicted, will bring in a forensic psychology expert to render an opinion about prior mental states, particularly motivation, in order to garner mitigation of guilt.  Some motivations seem worse than others, as is reflected in criminal law.

Motive is a legal concept.  It is a summary of what the perpetrator had to gain.  Motivation is a complex psychological concept dealing with the drives, emotions, beliefs, and attitudes that may impel (intrinsic motives) or compel (extrinsic motives) an action.  Every major school of psychological theory – neuropsychology, clinical, behavioral, social, and industrial – provide theories to explain an aspect of the murky business of human motivation.

Most licensed, qualified forensic psychology experts are careful about their opinions.  But because forensic psychologists tailor the assessment to the case, it is easy for them to find what they are hired to look for and even easier not to find what they are not looking for.  Forensic psychologists rely heavily on double-negative backflips because it is not possible to disprove not seeing something.  "We found no evidence that Mr. Smith was not a good husband prior to the time he bludgeoned his wife to death."  Furthermore, the expert opinion goes first to the defense attorney, who can ask for clarification and decide whether to use or suppress the opinion.

[We] did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed[.] ... [W]e found that these specific decisions were the result of discretionary judgments made during the course of an investigation by the Midyear agents and prosecutors and that these judgment calls were not unreasonable.

When Inspector General Horowitz issued the infamous summation of motivation (if indeed it was his own non-findings or was cooked up by his DOJ teammates in their mark-ups to the first draft), he chose to depart from the role of curator of documentary evidence and become a mind-reading forensic psychologist.  In that improper role, he inferred that only proper motivations drove his DOJ colleagues when they were committing numerous irregularities.  In his play for mitigation, Horowitz gave himself leave to sew a needlepoint of the finest threads.  And how pretty it turned out, because he could not identify a single instance of political bias, or any other untoward consideration, influencing the professional judgment of anyone at all.  Interestingly, this discovery of blameless intentions parallels James Comey's excuse for not prosecuting the Hillary Clinton email case, because he inferred that she also had no bad intentions.  So the fallback position to excuse the crimes of their candidates and comrades is for the DOJ top brass to become the worst forensic psychologists in the world.

It was outside the scope of Mr. Horowitz's expertise or methodology to rule out or even discuss the complex individual motivations of many different people in different contexts during the time period he surveyed.  The finding that no operant bias affected any particular legal judgment was a masterstroke of mitigation by distraction.  But in a perverse way, Mr. Horowitz was right.

Political bias has largely disappeared from the American conversation.  By the mid-twentieth century, science and technology had provided such a depth of material sustenance in the free economies that the class struggle simply vanished.  When economic competition between the classes disappeared, classical liberalism had nothing left to do, and it disappeared also.  What emerged was no longer a struggle over power and wealth, but a clash of spiritual and moral belief systems.  Today, the dichotomy is between the right wing, which is holding onto the Constitution and traditional Judeo-Christian values, and the left wing, which hates the right wing for it.  The left wing rationalizes its hatred and sense of superiority toward mainstream, patriotic Americans by imputing to them incurable racism, sexism, and so on.  Left-wingers are turning into frantic hate addicts as their arrogant fallacies of moral superiority become more preposterous and insupportable.

Therefore, Mr. Horowitz, yet another DOJ "straight shooter," has not been compiling a scorecard of a DOJ political scandal.  He has been mindlessly picking over rotten fruit from the tree of the Washington establishment's institutional hatred of the American people.  The foul and lawless inner workings of the DOJ upper echelon are not emailgate, Comeygate, Strzokgate, or Muellergate.  These proceedings are an existential threat to America, which should be called the Department of Justice vs. the Constitutional Presidency.  It is the case of the DOJ's outrage against Americans who had the impudence to nominate and elect the president they wanted according to the plan established in the Constitution.

The leitmotif of the Obama administration was ginning up and exploiting the presumption of racism in "bitter clingers to guns-n-religion," AKA the American people.  Where the Obamaites could not find racism, they made it up.  Obama's miserable wretch of an attorney general, Eric Holder, fired the first shot of the DOJ vs. the Constitutional Presidency when he vilified the American people as cowards.  For the next eight years, the federal government in general, and the DOJ in particular, became the bastion of a higher loyalty, to use Comey's phrase, than the one to the Constitution.

Historians will note that DOJ vs. the Constitutional Presidency has had at least three sordid phases.  The first was the DOJ crime wave necessary to protect and exonerate the corrupt, conspiratorial Democrat candidate while sabotaging, booby-trapping, and illegally surveilling the Republican candidate's campaign.  The second was using the power of the DOJ to conspire with other departments and private actors to manufacture and plant evidence first of the non-crime of collusion, then of anything else that could possibly be used to impeach the president.  The third wave, which is just heating up in its second year, is to use the unlimited, extra-constitutional powers of a special prosecutor to selectively investigate, terrorize, persecute, imprison, and destroy the family, employees, and associates of the president.

Mr. Horowitz has fulfilled the task of cataloging about 10% of the crimes and irregularities committed during phase one.  His job was to waste a lot of time, run everything past his DOJ compatriots, repackage what everybody already knew: the DOJ from Attorney General Lynch on down criminally conspired to protect Hillary Clinton while trying to destroy the Trump candidacy, based in their fear and hatred.  He had to do this in a manner to ensure that no one would be held criminally responsible. Then he had to play footsies under the table with Director Wray for a few afternoons.

Now I.G. Horowitz is going to take another year to investigate the open secrets of illegally obtained FISA warrants.  That takes care of another maybe 3 to 5% of DOJ vs. the Constitutional Presidency.  It is certain that Mr. Horowitz's next opus will again find no evidence of improper considerations.  What remains to be seen is if anyone will bother to read it.