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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.
Drew,
It’s a swamp. It’s too wet to really burn well.
Regards,
Jim
Great piece by our gal Mollie. Thanks, @ontheleftcoast for the link. Anyone who hasn’t read that article needs to just get off this thread and read it now.
She was on with Dennis Prager this morning and was terrific.
Do you feel better now Jim? Just let it all out….
My wife cries when I talk too much about politics. That’s why I come to Ricochet.
I don’t think that we have a link for Byron York today, who, along with McCarthy, Hemingway, and Sean Davis is on the Mt. Rushmore of coverage of this mess.
It’s interesting how in the workplace we are taught how to be sensitive to any words that might create discomfort for anyone, but in the FBI the workers can give vent to their feelings without any regard without any regard for how it might affect the workplace atmosphere. All they have to do is say, “I tend to exaggerate” and it doesn’t matter.
Somebody who is on the receiving end of an ordinary workplace environment complaint ought to try that line and see what it gets him.
You got that right @hoyacon! Example:
On Dec. 6, 2016, the two discussed having to be on call for the presidential inauguration. “f” [COC] trump,” wrote Agent 1.
Agent 1 was one of two agents who interviewed Clinton on July 2, 2016. Agent 5 was also on the Clinton investigation. Neither, according to Horowitz, was assigned to the Trump-Russia investigation.
So if I am PDJT and I read this, I want to know who these two unnamed agents are, because I never want them working to protect me or, more importantly, my family.
Rush outlined the known events in one of his recents newsletters (published way before the IG report). It’s clear there was collusion (which is not illegal) among the FBI, DOJ, and the Hillary campaign in regard to the fake Steele “dossier”. Oh, I should throw in the MSM too. While this isn’t necessarily a conspiracy per se, it is a political maneuver designed to overturn the result of an election.
In LA Confidential, CPT Dudley Smith explains to Bud White that the responsibility for the “Bloody Christmas” jail riot will be pinned on White’s guilty and unsympathetic partner and a bunch of old timers who have already retired.
Wray can’t begin to change the culture at the FBI if he doesn’t earn the trust of the work force. A first step is ensuring peeople understand they will be treated fairly, even if they were associated with the bad apples he needs to expose. Thus his paen to the organization.
Rosenstein, I don’t get. Unfortunately, Trump is handcuffed. The worst thing that could happen is for him to fire Rosenstein. The second worst thing is for Rosenstein to get pissed off and quit. I’m curious to know who recommended his appointment.
Of course you should. We learned from the report how the media were inviting FBI agents on golf outings, dinner and drinks, private parties, sporting events, and much more. They were essentially giving FBI agents favors either to get leaked information out of them or to reward them for the leaks. (Page 430)
And there were a LOT of leaks and a LOT of leakers. Check out Appendices G and H to the report for some startling charts showing all the leaks.
So yes, there was collusion between the FBI and the media. And we already know how Comey aided the media in creating “hooks” that would allow the media cover for disseminating anti-Trump propaganda.
Link Added. Must have hurt CNN to report on that, but they did make it a “Republicans pounce” story.
Am I misinterpreting things, or did the Wall Street Journal actually adopt the same false, misleading account of this IG report that it being peddled by the Democrats?
Byron York’s article details several leading Democrats saying things like: “There was no bias in the FBI”; “No bias at the FBI”; and “No evidence … [that the FBI] acted on the basis of political bias.” York then writes:
The WSJ’s statement (quoted in the OP) said:
That is wrong. That is false. It fails to make the critical distinction between direct and circumstantial evidence, and the circumstantial evidence is damning.
The IG report found no “documentary or testimonial evidence directly connecting the political views . . . to the specific investigative decisions we reviewed . . .”
However, the IG report detailed extensive evidence of political bias on the part of Peter Strzok, a “senior FBI official” who was “helping to lead the Russia investigation at the time” and who made the “decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the Midyear-related [i.e. Clinton-email-related] investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop . . ..”
The evidence was so strong that the IG report states that: “these text messages led us to conclude that we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision was free from bias.”
These details are on page 420-421 of the report — I will paste the entire relevant section below.
The thing that troubles me is the WSJ’s conflation of “no direct evidence” with “no evidence” — as if we should expect a smoking gun admission that a specific decision was the result of bias. Why in the world is the WSJ apparently siding with the misleading Democrat party line?
Seriously, I’m feeling a bit paranoid here. I haven’t been reading the WSJ lately. Has it gone Left-wing, or is this a Never Trump thing, or what?
The WSJ error quoted in the OP is not the only one. Here’s the lead of another article (mostly behind a paywall):
It is very troubling to not be able to trust the WSJ.
Here’s a key passage from pages 420-21 of the report, emphasis added (thanks to Mollie Hemingway for pointing us to these pages):
How can one read that, and then tell the world — as the WSJ did — that the IG report “found no evidence that the probe was affected by bias or other political considerations”?
I’m serious about this question. I pretty much already discount everything that I read in the MSM — for example, the NYT, or WaPo — unless it is contrary to the Leftist narrative. I think that I now need to include the WSJ in that category.
This is the heart of the Fake News problem.
How can I possibly form reasonable opinions when supposedly reputable news outlets are this unreliable? Seriously. I do not have time to read 500-page reports on my own.
Wall Street Journal staffers express relief over editor change
Relying on agencies to reform themselves is futile. They are the creations of Congress. Pin the tail squarely on the Elephant, the Congressional GOP.
I’m new to the details of the story. For folks who don’t know (this is on pages 396-98 of the IG report):
If we are to accept Tom’s idea that Strzok’s bias undermines everything he touched — then there goes the Russia investigation.
Devil’s advocate alert. I understand perfectly the distinction drawn between direct and circumstantial evidence, but I think that the key words in the quoted portion are “influence the investigative steps . . ” For many of us the IG’s report comes across as overly measured, but the matter of drawing a connection between any bias and the decisions made are at the heart of it. I would prefer that the WSJ had expanded on their take to go deeper into some of the instances of bias in the report, but that quote–though it does muddy the waters on types of evidence–accurately reflects the IG’s conclusion on he lack of provable instances where the bias led to a result.
It’s been a long time since I gave the WSJ the benefit of the doubt. They began swerving statist in the Obama years, and I suspect that as with most of the elite class, the election of Donald Trump (“not one of us!”) pushed them over the edge.
They’re still going to be a little more trustworthy than most media outlets. Kimberly Strassel is doing a good job covering the ridiculousness of the Mueller circus. But . . . yeah, I wouldn’t automatically trust them.
The WSJ news operation has long been aligned with the rest of the MSM and its editorial page has been slowly been heading there since Paul Gigot took it over. Also, the WSJ is firmly in sync with the globalist wing of the Uniparty, and has long been an open borders advocate, and opposes much of Trump’s agenda. But you’re right about Kimberly Strassel.
It was leftwing when I first started reading it in 1982. Except for the editorial page, of course.