Justice Dept. watchdog: Comey under investigation for memos, leaks
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department inspector general said Monday that his office is still probing possible misconduct in the FBI’s safeguarding of its own secrets – from how former Director James Comey handled his private memos, to whether others under him may have given sensitive details to reporters.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz revealed the continued investigative work to lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which on Monday conducted the first hearing to examine his 500-page report assessing how the FBI handled the high-profile investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.
The report blasted senior FBI officials for having shown a “willingness to take official action” to hurt Donald Trump’s chances of becoming president.
Monday’s hearing offered lawmakers on each side of the aisle an opportunity to press their long held talking points about the Clinton email case and the similarly charged investigation into Russia’s alleged influence on the 2016 election.
Horowitz conceded bias might have affected one FBI agent’s decision to prioritize the Russia case over the Clinton email probe and called out as particularly troubling a text exchange in which the agent told an FBI lawyer “we’ll stop” Trump from becoming president.
“We found the implication that senior FBI employees would be willing
to take official action to impact a presidential candidate’s electoral prospects to be deeply troubling and antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Justice Department,’’ Horowitz said.
One of Horowitz’s most notable assertions was that his office, based on a referral from the FBI, was reviewing the handling of Comey’s memos. Horowitz said he planned to issue a report on the matter, as well as another one on leaks from the FBI.
In his book released earlier this year, Comey said he shared one memo – about a February conversation with Trump – with a friend, Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman. Richman then gave the memo’s contents to the New York Times, which Comey has said was intentional, to spur the appointment of a special counsel.
Shortly after Comey was fired, an FBI review determined some of the information in two of his memos was classified, said a person familiar with the matter, prompting the FBI to retrieve those documents from two people with whom Comey had shared them.
Lawmakers voiced their displeasure with the findings.
“There is a serious problem with the culture at FBI headquarters,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asserted that the report showed Clinton “got the kid glove treatment,” and if it were not for the inspector general, FBI officials would “still be plotting about how to use their official position to stop” Trump. The report detailed how investigators on the Clinton case shied from using subpoenas or other legal tools to force witnesses to testify or turn over materials.
The report found that key players in the FBI’s probes of Clinton and Russian interference in the 2016 election expressed anti-Trump sentiments in text messages to each other. Then-top counterintelligence official Peter Strzok told then-FBI lawyer Lisa Page that “we’ll stop” Donald Trump from becoming president.
Horowitz called out the Strzok-Page exchange specifically and noted investigators could not conclude that bias did not affect Strzok in fall 2016, when he and others at the bureau moved exceptionally slowly to run down a new lead in the Clinton email case.
The inspector general’s report was particularly damaging for Comey, calling his actions in the last months of the Clinton email case “extraordinary” and “insubordinate.”
The hearing Monday seemed to foreshadow that his time in the spotlight is not done. While Horowitz confirmed he is reviewing his memos, Republican lawmakers pressed for another possible line of inquiry: Comey’s own use of a private email for work purposes. The inspector found five instances in which Comey either drafted official messages on or forwarded emails to his personal ac- count, though Horowitz said from what he had seen, none of the emails contained classified information.
Grassley said his committee had invited Comey, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to testify at Monday’s hearing, but each had declined. He took particular aim at Comey, who he said had claimed to be out of the country, though a weekend tweet showed him standing in the middle of a field somewhere in Iowa.
“He has time for book tours and television interviews, but apparently no time to assist this committee, which has primary jurisdiction over the Justice Department,” Grassley said.