Report blasts FBI but doesn’t give Trump win
Bureau entangled in presidential election
WASHINGTON: An inspector-general report condemning the FBI’s actions in the Hillary Clinton email investigation blasts former FBI Director James B Comey but also denies total vindication to the president who fired him.
The 500-page document stops far short of endorsing the attacks levied at Mr Comey for the past year by President Donald Trump.
Although Mr Trump has alleged that a politically tainted FBI tried to undermine his Republican campaign, the report found nothing to suggest that political preferences influenced how the investigation was conducted.
Mr Trump has suggested anyone less politically connected than Ms Clinton would have been charged for the same behaviour, yet the report does not second-guess the FBI’s decision to spare her from prosecution.
And while the president has said Mr Comey’s deputy, Andrew McCabe, should have excused himself because of Democratic political contributions to his wife, the report said he acted appropriately in flagging the issue inside the bureau.
“We f ound no evidence that the conclusions by the prosecutors were affected by bias or other improper considerations; rather, we determined that they were based on the prosecutors’ assessment of the facts, the law and past department practice,’’ the report says.
Yet there’s no doubt the report gave Mr Trump fresh ammunition for continued attacks on Mr Comey and for his defense that Mr Comey’s firing in May 2017 — an act now central to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether the president sought to obstruct justice — was wholly justified.
The report branded Mr Comey as insubordinate for repeatedly breaking with Justice Department protocol in his handling of the email probe in the explosive final months of the 2016 presidential campaign. It also sharply rebuked FBI officials who traded politically charged, anti-Trump text messages even as the investigation into the campaign was under way.
The report released on Thursday documents in painstaking detail one of the most consequential investigations in modern FBI history and reveals how the bureau, which for decades has endeavoured to stand apart from politics, came to be entangled in the 2016 presidential election.
It underscores efforts by FBI and Justice Department leaders to juggle developments in the Clinton investigation — she had used private email for government business while secretary of state — with a separate probe that was then unknown to the American public into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Mr Comey, whom Mr Trump fired shortly after taking office, bore the brunt of much of the report’s criticism.
It says the FBI director broke from Justice Department protocol when he announced in July 2016 that Ms Clinton had been “extremely careless” with classified material but would not be charged with any crime, and again months later when he told Congress just days before the election that the investigation into Ms Clinton’s emails had been reopened.
Though it says those mistakes weren’t politically motivated, Trump supporters seized on the report’s description of Mr Comey as “insubordinate”.
And they quickly focused on the report’s recounting of anti-Trump text messages from two FBI officials who worked the Clinton probe and later the Russia case, including one from August 2016 in which an agent says, “We’ll stop it”, with regard to a possible Trump victory.
The report suggests that text from Peter Strzok, who was later dropped from Mr Mueller’s team, “implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects”. It did not find evidence that those views seeped into the investigation.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the report “reaffirmed the president’s suspicions about Mr Comey’s conduct and the political bias amongst some of the members of the FBI’’.
FBI Director Chris Wray told reporters the FBI accepted the report’s findings and was making changes, including requiring further training for FBI employees and reemphasising the importance of objectivity. In a New York Times opinion piece released after the report, Mr Comey said he disagreed with some conclusions but respected the watchdog’s work.
The inspector-general faulted Mr Comey for his unusual July 5, 2016 news conference at which he disclosed his recommendation against bringing charges, even though cases that end without prosecution are rarely discussed publicly. Mr Comey did not reveal to Attorney-General Loretta Lynch his plans to make an announcement.