Stunning incompetence is the most charitable way to describe the FBI’s review of the emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server that escaped destruction. Only the intervention of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s unit within the DOJ prevented the case from being closed with no examination of the existence of the classified documents on a non-secure, easily hacked platform.

And we only know of this massive FBI screw-up through the just-released lovebird texts from Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation explains:

The FBI didn’t flag that some emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server were marked classified with a “(C)” when they were sent — something that seemingly would have been one of the first and most obvious checks in an investigation, and one that FBI agents instantly recognized put the facts at odds with Clinton’s public statements.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General noticed it after the FBI missed it, texts between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, reveal. “Holy cow,” Strzok wrote, “if the FBI missed this, what else was missed?”

“Remind me to tell you to flag for Andy [redacted] emails we (actually ICIG) found that have portion marks (C) on a couple of paras. DoJ was Very Concerned about this,” he wrote.

“Found on the 30k [emails] provided to State originally. No one noticed. It cuts against ‘I never sent or received anything marked classified,'” he wrote, referring to statements by Clinton downplaying the danger of her email practices. (snip)

On May 10, 2016, Strzok had suggested that in his mind, the investigation was closer to being finished than to just getting started — suggesting that if it weren’t for the inspector general, it might have closed down and cleared her despite missing the most obvious first step.

“I cannot overstate to you the sense of urgency about wanting to logically and effectively conclude this investigation,” he said.

The ommission allowed Clinton to repeatedly and prominently state that she had “never received nor sent any material that was marked classified” on her private email server while secretary of state.

I was going to criticize the FBI for missing documents marked as classified while looking for classified documents -- until I remembered that Rep. Eric Swalwell and his media claque at CNN accuse people who criticize the FBI as doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin. So, in light of the witch hunters patrolling America these days, let me state that anyone could miss a specific marking of "classified" multiple times while looking for exactly such markings. Hey, nobody’s perfect. Especially not the FBI. But they're plenty good enough for the Democrats.