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DOJ Inspector General Report on FBI Investigation of Hillary Clinton
The Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton has been released. You can read the (568 page!) document yourself here. Share any revelations you find in it here in the comments.
The Washington Post reports that:
The Justice Department inspector general on Thursday castigated former FBI Director James B. Comey for his actions during the Hillary Clinton email investigation and found that other senior bureau officials showed a ‘willingness to take official action’ to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president.
The Wall Street Journal:
The inspector general also blasted FBI personnel who exchanged text messages that were critical of President Donald Trump during his campaign, saying the missives “cast a cloud over the entire FBI investigations and sowed doubt about the FBI’s” handling of the probe.
Nevertheless, the inspector general concluded in its 500-page report, that it found no evidence that the FBI or Justice Department allowed political bias to influence the investigative steps the watchdog examined as part of its wide-ranging inquiry.
A recently discovered text exchange, however, between FBI agent Peter Strzok, who led the Clinton investigation, and an FBI lawyer, Lisa Page, raised concerns about how the FBI handled the discovery of Clinton-related emails on a laptop once used by one of her aides, Huma Abedin.
The IG Report states on page 13 (I’m a slow reader):
Published in PoliticsWe found that Strzok used his personal email accounts for official government business on several occasions, including forwarding an email from his FBI account to his personal email account about the proposed search warrant the Midyear team was seeking on the Weiner laptop. This email included a draft of the search warrant affidavit, which contained information from the Weiner investigation that appears to have been under seal at the time in the Southern District of New York and information obtained pursuant to a grand jury subpoena issued in the Eastern District of Virginia in the Midyear investigation.
What Congress must compel is production of all drafts. Then, if the earlier drafts are bad for the bureaucracy, subpoena everyone to testify as to why they concealed the whole truth from Congress, while it is controlled by Republicans.
At this point, the President should order complete production of unredacted documents to the relevant committees. The committees have clear Constitutional authority to dictate to the agencies, which they create and sustain, the standards for information Congress alone determines it needs. The committees have over a year of repeated demands documented.
No such thing as too “sensitive.” Every program is subject to effective oversight by some members of Congress, with the appropriate clearances.
I see a stunning level of arrogance or incompetence. This is a decade plus into widespread use of text messages and email. Everyone already had lots of awareness of bad things happening with text messages and email. Yet, here we are. Do these guardians of justice also use “password” as password on their personal devices? Pin 1234?
My thoughts exactly @cliffordbrown. For that level of incompetence alone they all need to be fired.
All those who were quoting Trey Gowdy a week or so ago when he was saying “nothing to see here” on Obama Administration spying on the Trump Campaign should listen to him now.
Right, we should look into that. Nothing is proven yet beyond the fact that FBI agents can be liberals and that they discuss politics with one another.
Editor Emeritus Mollie Hemingway uses it all the time.
Where do we stand on Contributors doing the same?
Agreed, innocent until proven guilty. Let’s keep in mind that Strzok was the same one who creatively revised Comey’s exoneration statement to make Hillary’s conduct sound non-prosecutable. The IG report also says Strzok sat on the Weiner laptop emails (insert dirty joke here) for a month, and that the report’s authors found reasons offered for the delay “unpersuasive”.
Yes, investigate, and yes, the accused have rights. But let’s remember that Strzok was the agent in charge of the Russia collusion investigation. Therefore, every investigatory decision and every piece of evidence that is the work product of the early phase of the FBI investigation of the Russia Russia Russia affair is inherently suspect. Trump supporters will be reminding Trump skeptics of this fact from now on. Get used to that.
Well, talk of some grand deep state conspiracy has been laid bare as the nonsense it is. They can’t be hyper-competent master conspirators and incompetent at the same time.
There was a post last year, about September/October, where the editors stated no more derogatory terms from both sides: including, but not limited to, Trumpster/Never Trump.
But because this site sucks, I wasted so much damn time searching for it on this sucky site. Search function sucks. Going back two pages at a time, as slow as this site is to load, only to find that at about page 82 there are no more posts, just podcasts. But if anyone else can find it, it would work great Here.
According to my memory, you are correct. The post you are searching for was actually “pinned” to the top of the member feed. “Trumpsters” “Trumpers” etc, along with Never Trump were officially banned.
But it got awkward when people on the Ricochet podcast continued to use the terms. So we’ve all kind of moved on.
@Strawman. (@fredcole: do me a favor and just change your handle …)
Who called Strzok and Page competent? Straw man is right.
I had the day off today so I had more time than usual to cull Ricochet and Twitter to see what people are saying.
That people working for the FBI had an opinion on who should be president comes as no surprise. They’re people.
And thanks to a very big family, lots of friends and acquaintances and a very messy life, there’s one thing I know for sure: people suck.
Which is why it’s so important to limit and constrain power. My impression is that the FBI has enjoyed a reputation that appears to be undeserved. Once they were able to insert themselves and use influence, they couldn’t help themselves. Turn a blind eye to HRC? Done. Manufacture a collusion case? Done. Manage to catch some political enemies on an inconsistency? Lying to a Federal Agent! That’s a felony. Tell us everything, or we’ll charge your son …
It doesn’t take a conspiracy; it takes a lot of people with too much power.
Thanks to personal experience, I’ve become somewhat jaded. I lost whatever hope was left when I read License to Lie
I had to laugh when I listened to the live press conference today; FBI whomever talking about the thousands of FBI offices and the thousands of FBI agents, all committed to whatever.
They’re people. And they suck. Just like everyone else.
Its time for congress to disband the FBI and start over.
That well is permanently poisoned.
BTW: I have the answer to all that ails us:
Make the job of President so small that when Jimmy Kimmel asked random people : who is the President …
And they don’t know, that’s okay.
What do they care? They should care what their state is doing with property taxes, and what their mayor and city council are up to.
The president? Let him worry about the big stuff; a hopeful peace in Korea being a good example. Pissing off my Canadian relatives a close #2.
God bless the journalists and concerned citizens who are able to comb through the text for those of us that cannot read the 500+ pages.
For a moment, I’ll get more political as Clinton is the gift that keeps on giving. There is so much fodder for use here for a savvy re-election or midterm campaign. I see t-shirts with “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop him” with MAGA2020 stamped over the quote. I would get the contributors to the Clinton Cash graphic novel to start using the report for a similar visually accessible novel that could be converted into digestible YouTube clips. A phrase that could be popularized: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘bias’ is…” to borrow from BJ Clinton. It’s sadly divisive but it promotes the cloud of doubt about Dems at any level with reigns of power. Just some thoughts…
Page 417:
I wonder what criteria he uses for that determination. Maybe it’s one of those things that can never be proven, like the existence of a table.
Omg! That proves it! The Deep State Conspiracy is real!
Please.
My wife pretty much had that “I can’t stop crying” reaction the night of the election. And wrt to the condescending comments about Trump supporters, nfn, but I’ve heard people on Ricochet say the exact same thing about Obama voters.
Kinda like having an unsecured server with secret information on it housed in a Colorado bathroom.
EDIT: Not worth my time.
That’s what we get for putting all our chips on some bureaucrat named Horowitz. All the build-up about him being above the fray, respected by both sides, unassailable, the quintessential fair minded official we could put our trust in. It’s really quite naive to expect so much from any bureaucrat on any level. Mueller was billed as the unbiased, well respected one to conduct a fair investigation. Comey, in his day, as well. Trump kept him on and apparently thought him a straight shooter.
Horowitz is just one guy with a career in government. Like any other bureaucrat it’s predictable he will protect his position and his future. This is especially so when he knows who his Master is. Where he doesn’t, like here, conclusions need to be hedged, to protect against political change. So, the inconclusive report that bias discovered wasn’t documented proof of political bias that distorted the Hillary investigation.
BTW, any evidence against DJT will be met with this question: Was Peter Strzok anywhere near this piece of evidence? Russia Russia Russia is now dead. Peter Strzok killed it.
Actually, they have demonstrated just that.
As Kimberly Strassel pointed out (all words in quotes are hers, but I basically agree):
You can read the whole thread here.
Meanwhile – as I predicted earlier in this thread – the usual suspects are using the Horowitz report to assure all of us “nothing to see here, move along,” using pretzel logic to explain why none of this stuff is nearly as important as hunting down the Moby Dick of the Trump Presidency. To quote Thomas Paine (with a hat tip to H. Beam Piper) ‘To argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason is as futile as to administer medicine to the dead.’ You are not going to convince these folks that there is anything wrong with abusing the FBI’s power if the end goal is bringing down Donald Trump.
The deep state is very real. However, it is not a conspiracy in the sense every individual is working with others in an organized fashion to change the results of an election. Because the leftists in government think so much alike, the actions they do take seem to be in harmony, so it looks like a conspiracy.
In this case however, I believe there was a conspiracy within the FBI and the DOJ to get a special counsel appointed, because surely Trump had some criminal dealings in his past which could be used to force him out of office. The “Russian collusion” angle was merely the match that lit the fuse . . .
I don’t know why people insist that those involved in a conspiracy cannot possibly be incompetent. There are dozens of examples of just that, including the way the Nazis work and the final attempt of the old line Communists to bring down Gorbachev back in the early 1990s. All it takes is a long history of getting away with bad behavior and a conviction that you are invincible. Both of which conditions existed in the FBI during this period. You get sloppy and start doing stupid stuff.
That’s interesting. Talk me through the steps in that.
Because the events leading up to the appointment don’t lend themselves to your interpretation.
In Comey’s own testimony before Congress, he stated that leaked his memos with the specific purpose of getting a special counsel named.