Trump, critics take sides in IG report

WASHINGTON » A Justice Department watchdog report has turned into Washington’s latest Rorschach test, with President Donald Trump and his critics each cherry picking what they want to see from its findings to either discredit or defend investigators conducting the probe into the White House.

The 500-page inspector general report, which was more than a year in the making, offered a nuanced conclusion about the bureau’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe, criticizing the FBI and its former director James Comey personally but not finding evidence that political bias tainted the investigation in the months and days leading up to Trump’s election.

But Trump wielded it as a blunt instrument on Friday, bludgeoning the integrity of the Justice Department by pointing to the politicallycharged communication among FBI employees as proof that the FBI was biased “at the top level” and “plotting against my election.”

“The end result was wrong. There was total bias,” Trump declared Friday. “Comey was the ring leader of this whole, you know, den of thieves. It was a den of thieves.”

Trump allies seized upon text messages between agents, pointing to one from August 2016 that said “We’ll stop it” with regard to a potential Trump victory and another from a bureau lawyer that said “Viva le resistance.” And Trump took it one step further, barreling out of the White House Friday for an unannounced, early-morning television interview that turned into a nearly hourlong freewheeling give-and-take with reporters, during which he returned time and again to assert that report had exonerated him amid Mueller’s ongoing probe into Russian election interference.