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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.
Sounds like the fruit of the poisoned tree to me.
Yes. And that was after the President publicly threatened him with recording of their conversations that didn’t exist.
Fred,
Actually, I’m now not as interested in the FBI woke folk as I am in your fundamental relationship. How often does she cry when confronted with a political result she doesn’t like? What if you had gone home and told her you voted for Trump. Would she cry or scream or threaten to leave you?
Just curious.
Regards,
Jim
Wray should resign in disgrace for the NEEDZ MOAR TRAINING line. Making the agents watch a 10 minute video on not abusing their positions isn’t going to do anything about the problem (they don’t exist for the employee), and based upon some kinds of research, will likely reinforce the negative behavior.
Anybody else feeling the irony? The investigation was about Hillary’s use of private email/phones instead of government email/phones to hide her her corrupt activity. The FBI’s spin is basically that they have to train their agents to not use government email/phones to better hide their corrupt activity.
Wray should resign in disgrace for his statement to the press: “Nothing in this report impugns the integrity of our workforce as a whole or the FBI as an institution.”
And yes, the part of the report recommending how to fix the FBI was laughable. I know I’m cynical, but that’s all organizational nonsense.
Heck, the whole report was, as Mollie Hemingway points out,
By the way, Mollie’s summary today is worth reading. Don’t skip it. Unless you aren’t interested in anything except total exoneration of the FBI and the DOJ.
ct,
Well, of course, it’s about the phone, not the corrupt activity. I think the new i-phone x has a corruption filter that will automatically filter out calls to you or made by you that are corrupt.
Technology is just so Wunderbar!
Regards,
Jim
Jim, is this really a place you wanna go?
Why not? You are already there.
Fred,
This is not a Grand Jury. All questions on Ricochet are optional. I was just expressing curiosity.
Regards,
Jim
There’s a difference between in degrees using one’s wife in an anecdote and someone asking a man questions about his marriage.
Standard bureaucratic response. I have a great deal of empathy for Wray. He’s coming behind the elephant parade. If nothing else he’s going to be required to fake sincere efforts at cleaning things up, including mouthing the conventional pieties the press and Congress have come to expect.
Public flogging of unsympathetic creatures like McCabe and many more quiet retirements and resignations. We won’t know the results for years.
Agreed. Those comments are well out of bounds.
Seemed like a fairly innocuous question to me. But, they say the dog that barks loudest is the one that got hit.
That’s fine. I’ll answer these questions one at a time.
That was the only time. And she wasn’t crying about a political result. She was crying about what it said about her country.
The election of Donald Trump was so shocking and disturbing, so upsetting, such a rebuke to the notion of American decency, that I don’t blame her for crying. At times I think was psychopathic of me not to cry.
Lots of people were crying when Donald Trump were elected. You make my wife sound like a lunatic. She was and is well aware of my political opinions. None have made her cry or scream.
I cannot imagine the hypothetical you describe here. However, were I so indifferent to Donald Trump’s depravity, absence of character, and complete unfitness for the presidency that I would have somehow voted for him, I imagine she would not be together in the first place.
An addendum to the last paragraph comment #106:
That’s not meant to be a knock on any individual here who pulled the lever for Donald Trump on election day 2016, thinking him the lesser of two evils. I do not begrudge you that choice, even if I vehemently disagree with it. I at least understand it.
Fred,
As you have chosen to answer my questions I will comment on your comments. I really wasn’t implying anything about her (or your) right to an emotional or psychosomatic response to any given political outcome. For instance, if Hillary Clinton had become President I surely would have been nauseated to the point of infirmity. However, I was a bit curious about the possibility of emotional blackmail. Just for the hypothetical, if you had voted for Trump would that have been grounds for divorce in her eyes?
Enquiring minds want to know.
Regards,
Jim
I’m saying that the conflict of our values in order for that to take place would be such that we wouldn’t be married in the first place.
No, it’s not a useful term. Quite the opposite. It is a term of derision used to undermine an individual before he even makes an argument, which is one of the least admirable tactics of the left.
Fred,
Thus for you the appellation “Never Trump” isn’t in any way a term of derision but rather a statement of fact. That’s fine. The reason for my question has more to do with a phenomenon we are seeing over and over again. It seems to have been given the name “freedom for me but not for thee”. Increasingly we are seeing people who define respect as respect for a singular doctrinaire opinion everyone else is expected to conform to. The modern version is sort of an exclusive inclusiveness.
Curious, did your marriage vows include a vow never to vote for Donald Trump? I’d like to know the extent of this commitment.
Regards,
Jim
I’m not following your meaning here.
Can you give me an example? And what does it have to do with your increasingly prying and personal questions?
My marriage vows included no mention of Donald Trump.
Fred,
You have satisfied my curiosity. I shall ask no more questions about your marriage.
Regards,
Jim
Fine then. Can you explain this “freedom for me but not for thee” thing and how it relates to the discussion?
Except for the people who wear the label proudly.
Mollie Hemingway:
To paraphrase her: yes, there were leaks at the FBI, but it’s so bad that fixing it would be too hard and disruptive, so… whatever.
The logic is pervasive and dangerous, and goes something like this:
Clinton would have preserved and expanded the corruption, and thus safeguarded DOJ and FBI.
Trump, not so much.
Is this what is driving a man whom Andrew McCarthy believes to be “scrupulous and professional” to behave as if he has every justification to defy Congress’ oversight efforts?
For the handful of people — on and off Ricochet — who do so, sure.
I too would have empathy for Wray, if he were the least bit empathetic. As it is, he seems marginally less obnoxious than Rosenstein.
It sure seems like every swamp-dweller that is removed gets replaced by another swamp-dweller.
Which is why the “burn it to the ground and start over from scratch” approach sound like the best bet.