Official probe finds Comey mishandled Clinton email inquiry
WASHINGTON — A long-awaited review of the FBI’s actions during the 2016 campaign concludes former FBI Director James B. Comey and others mishandled the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and improperly shared information about that investigation with the public.
The report, released Thursday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, said Comey acted improperly but was not motivated by political bias. It does not question his decision not to pursue a criminal case against Clinton. But it harshly criticized the FBI and Justice Department’s handling of the matter.
The report also revealed new text exchanges between top agents involved in the investigation that reflect antipathy toward Donald Trump and a desire to keep him from winning the 2016 election.
Trump’s allies quickly seized on those texts as evidence for his claim that people within the FBI have conspired against him.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the report “reaffirms” Trump’s “suspicions about Director Comey.” The text messages the report unveiled illustrated “the political bias the president has been talking about,” she said.
The report also documents “harm caused by leaks, fear of potential leaks and a culture of unauthorized media contacts” by FBI agents and officials.
Ironically, however, given Trump’s fury over leaks and concerns over politics at the FBI, the report suggests that the leaks and the bias the text messages reflected may have ultimately done more damage to Clinton, in part by delaying the FBI from reopening its investigation into her emails until the final days of the campaign, when the action was most harmful to her.
The focus of the report was on how the FBI went about investigating Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state. The practice violated government protocol and left classified information at risk of exposure. Clinton was accused by political opponents of recklessly endangering national security and trying to conceal her communications from disclosure under open records laws.
The Justice Department’s handling of the investigation was attacked by Democrats and Republicans. Trump’s allies complained that the department, and Comey in particular, failed to pursue what they perceived to be blatant law breaking by Clinton. Democrats were enraged that Comey disregarded procedure by publicly sharing details about the email investigation in a manner that inflicted considerable political damage on Clinton.
The report offered no assessment of how the FBI’s actions ultimately affected the outcome of the election, but allies of Clinton and Trump used it to bolster their case that their candidate was gravely harmed by the agency.
The investigators called the manner in which Comey disclosed the FBI’s findings on Clinton’s email, at a news conference in July of the election year, “extraordinary and insubordinate.”
“We found none of his reasons to be a persuasive basis for deviating from well-established Department policies in a way intentionally designed to avoid supervision by Department leadership over his actions,” the report stated.
“While we did not find that these decisions were the result of political bias on Comey’s part, we nevertheless concluded that by departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice,” Horowitz wrote in the report’s conclusions.
Comey should have worked in coordination with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the report said. Comey decided not to work closely with Lynch following disclosure that she had met with former President Bill Clinton at an airport in Phoenix while the investigation was going on.
The report found that while there is no evidence Lynch and Clinton engaged in inappropriate discussions at that meeting, “we also found that Lynch’s failure to recognize the appearance problem created by former President Clinton’s visit and to take action to cut the visit short was an error in judgment.”
In interviews with investigators, Comey described the predicament he was in as a “500-year flood” for the FBI, leaving him facing a confluence of events in which following department protocol threatened to do more lasting damage to the agency than proceeding as he did. Lynch’s credibility had been undermined, and he did not want to give the public a reason to suspect the FBI’s refusal to prosecute Clinton was politically motivated, he said.