House GOP steps up criticism of FBI in wake of report
Washington — House Republicans are escalating their monthslong standoff with the Justice Department, saying the FBI hasn’t adequately addressed bias within the agency and threatening to hold top department officials in contempt — or even impeach them.
The stepped-up criticism comes after the department’s internal watchdog released a report last week that criticized the FBI’s handling of the 2016 probe into Democrat Hillary Clinton’s emails, but said political bias didn’t affect the outcome of the investigation that eventually cleared her. Bolstered by President Donald Trump, some Republicans say there’s no way that bias against then-candidate Trump found among some employees didn’t taint the Clinton probe — and, by extension, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s Republican campaign and Russia.
At a House hearing Tuesday, Republicans angrily asked Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz how anti-Trump texts found between some employees who worked on the Clinton probe didn’t influence the outcome. They also complained that they have not yet received some of the documents they have demanded from the department.
“We can’t survive with a justice system we don’t trust,” said Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Horowitz said in the report, and repeated at the hearing, that he had concluded the outcome of the investigation was determined by prosecutors’ assessment of the facts, not by bias.
Democrats accused the Republicans of trying to distract from or undermine the Mueller investigation by focusing on a few employees who were biased. Several Democrats talked about children separated from their parents at the border, asking why the committee’s focus was still on the candidate who lost the presidency in 2016 instead of on current crises.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said Republicans were stuck in a “time warp.” Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California noted that the Judiciary Committee oversees immigration issues and should be focused on that.
Trump, who falsely claimed last week that the report exonerated him in the Russia probe, took the opposite view. In a speech to the National Federation of Independent Business on Tuesday, Trump said Democrats “want to focus on immigration because they want to keep the cameras away from the hearings.”