‘WE’LL STOP IT’
Trump won’t be president, FBI agent boasted in text:
A Justice Department IG report released yesterday said text messages show that FBI agent Peter Strzok assured his girlfriend that the agency would be able to stop Donald Trump from becoming president.
Ex-FBI chief James Comey was “insubordinate” and deviated from standard FBI procedures in the probe into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails — but he was not motivated by political bias, the Justice Department’s inspector general said in a report released Thursday.
Comey’s actions nonetheless damaged the bureau’s reputation for impartiality, IG Michael Horowitz said in his highly anticipated findings.
The former top G-man made a “serious error of judgment” when he announced shortly before the 2016 election that he was reopening an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server only to say days later that the probe was again closed, the 568-page report said.
The report also said Comey was “insubordinate” in his decision to announce in July 2016 that there was not enough evidence to bring a criminal case against Clinton, even though he hadn’t consulted his Justice Department boss, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
“Comey admitted that he concealed his intentions from the Department until the morning of his press conference on July 5, and instructed his staff to do the same, to make it impracticable for Department leadership to prevent him from delivering his statement,” the report said.
Horowitz called that sneaky move “extraordinary and insubordinate.”
Comey had argued that Lynch, an Obama appointee, left him no choice when she would not recuse herself from the Clinton probe after a June 2016 meeting with Bill Clinton aboard a plane on an airport tarmac raised concerns that she was conflicted.
Thursday’s report found no evidence Lynch discussed the e-mail investigation with Bill Clinton, but said she failed “to recognize the appearance problem created by former President Clinton’s visit.”
Her failure to “cut the visit short was an error in judgment,” the report said.
Horowitz did not contest Comey’s decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for the e-mail affair, but said his actions were harmful to the bureau and Justice Department, which President Trump has repeatedly accused of being biased against him.
“While we did not find that these deci- sions 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,” the report said.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the report, which also included anti-Trump text messages from FBI agents assigned to the e-mail and Russia probes, “points out the political bias that the president’s been talking about that has been repeatedly mentioned from this administration that we found to be a huge problem.”
Trump has regularly hammered Comey, calling him a “liar and a leaker,” saying he was in the tank for the Clintons and a “real nutjob,” among other insults.
“So, the Democrats make up a phony crime, Collusion with the Russians, pay a fortune to make the crime sound real, ille-
gally leak (Comey) classified information so that a Special Councel [sic] will be appointed, and then Collude to make this pile of garbage take on life in Fake News!” he tweeted Thursday.
Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) disputed the conclusion that the investigation was not motivated by political bias.
“Absent an outright confession, they’re not going to be able to draw that conclusion,” Johnson said.
“That will be up to the American public to draw their own conclusion. I don’t see how the inspector general can draw the conclusion.”
But Democrats said the report showed that Comey helped Trump get elected by announcing that the email probe was reopened so soon before the election.
John Podesta, who ran the Clinton campaign, said “the report demonstrates beyond doubt” that Comey was unfair to her by talking about her e-mails in October 2016 while not revealing anything about the separate probe beginning in July 2016 into the Trump campaign and Russia.
“This report confirms what we have known for a long time — that the FBI inappropriately applied a double standard to the Clinton and Trump investigations which hurt her and helped elect him,” Podesta said.
Christopher Wray, the current FBI director, said the report exonerates the bureau from charges of political bias.
“This report did not find any evidence of political bias or improper considerations actually impacting the investigation under review,” Wray said.
“Nothing in this report impugns the integrity of our work force as a whole or the FBI as an institution.”
Comey defended himself in an op-ed in The New York Times after the report was released.
“In 2016, my team faced an extraordinary situation — something I thought of as a 500-year flood — offering no good choices and presenting some of the hardest decisions I ever had to make,” he wrote, saying he disagreed with some of the report but overall found it to be “reasonable.”
“We knew that reasonable people might choose to do things differently and that a future independent reviewer might not see things the way we did. Yet I always believed that an inspector general report would be crucial to understanding.”
Michael Horowitz’s report on the Clinton e-mail investigation is chock full of “whoa” moments, but it’s best to keep in mind that his goal as Justice Department inspector general is to try to reestablish standards for both Justice and the FBI — not to actually say whether the Clinton probe was done properly.
Ex-FBI chief Jim Comey writes in The New York Times that the report “resoundingly demonstrates that there was no prosecutable case against Mrs. Clinton, as we had concluded.” Not so: It says the decisions that led to that conclusion were all, individually, within the bounds of department guidelines.
And there are bombshells along the way, like the fact that Comey himself sometimes used his personal e-mail to conduct (unclassified) FBI business. And that top FBI agent Peter Strzok actually e-mailed documents from the Anthony Weiner investigation to his own private account.
Indeed, Horowitz seems most frustrated by the Weiner angle — in particular, by the fact that the FBI’s top ranks waited nearly a month before acting on word from New York that the feds there had found Clinton e-mails on the disgraced ex-congressman’s laptop.
He finds all their explanations for the delay “unpersuasive” but couldn’t “identify a consistent or persuasive explanation for the FBI’s failure to act.”
He does flag the reluctance of Strzok to turn his own attention back to Clinton, from the investigation of possible Team Trump collusion with Russia — which has to be judged in the context of Strzok’s “We’ll stop it” text about the possibility of a Trump presidency.
Comey, meanwhile, told the IG that he’s not even sure he knew in October 2016 that Weiner was married to Huma Abedin. Really? Quite apart from what he should have known about a central figure in the Clinton probe, Abedin was prominently by Weiner’s side during two scandals that made national news for weeks on end.
Horowitz faults Comey as “insubordinate” for both his June announcement that he didn’t think Clinton should be charged (even as he slammed her conduct) and the late October announcement that he was reopening the investigation.
Maybe Comey was wrong to “speak out,” as he puts it. But maybe he should have made bigger waves earlier on.
The FBI was furious over President Barack Obama’s public statements clearing Clinton long before the investigation was done. Many agents seriously questioned decisions by their Obama-appointed overseers at Justice in the Clinton probe. And investigators knew that Obama himself was at least slightly implicated, thanks to his e-mails with Clinton.
Plus, Comey chafed at Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s directive to call the investigation a “matter,” and was outraged by news of her tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton.
Distrusting his political overseers, Comey took matters into his own hands.
Perhaps someday he’ll explain why he never seriously considered calling for a special counsel to cut the politicians out of it all.