Trump: Clinton is guilty and she knows it WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 27: FBI Director James Comey waits for the beginning of a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee September 27, 2016 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The committee held a hearing on "Fifteen Years After 9/11: Threats to the Homeland." (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) US President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton arrive at a campaign event in Charlotte, North Carolina, on July 5, 2016. / AFP / NICHOLAS KAMM (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images) GOP operative Peter Smith committed suicide at age 81 shortly after describing to the WSJ his efforts online to track down Hillary Clinton's emails, which he believed had been hacked and stolen from her private server. U.S. President Donald Trump waves as he walks with his wife Melania to Marine One while departing from the White House on July 12, 2017 in Washington, DC. President Trump is traveling to France where he will meet with President Emmanuel Macron and will attend Bastille Day events on Friday. SAN FRANCISCO, CA - MARCH 28: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivers a keynote address during the 28th Annual Professional Business Women of California conference on March 28, 2017 in San Francisco, California. Hillary Clinton delivered the keynote address at the day-long conference featuring speakers, seminars and panel discussions with industry leaders. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) (CNN) — What a mess. There are no winners in Thursday’s release of the 500-page Justice Department inspector general report on the FBI’s actions during the 2016 election. Inspector General Michael Horowitz said former FBI Director James Comey was “insubordinate,” former Attorney General Loretta Lynch erred in judgment, and FBI officials beyond Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were unprofessional in sending anti-Trump messages. Here are the major takeaways from the report’s release: Comey’s long series of bad decisions When it came to overseeing the Clinton email investigation, Comey blew it – at least in the eyes of the inspector general. Yes, Comey faced no-win decisions that were sure to anger everyone around him. But over and over, according to the report, he made the wrong call. The inspector general gave a bruising series of conclusions on Comey’s conduct: He shouldn’t have held his July 2016 news conference about the Clinton investigation. When he did it anyway, he should have informed then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch about his recommendation not to pursue charges. And he shouldn’t have told Congress, just days before the 2016 election, that there were new Clinton emails to examine. Perhaps this is why there are protocols in place and norms to be followed. The report suggests that if Comey stuck to the rules – no matter the fallout – he would not have been faulted for it today. And most ironic for Clinton supporters, Comey also used his Gmail for FBI business at times. RELATED: What Comey did and what the IG said about it A major blow to the FBI’s credibility It’s not every day that the FBI director steps in front of the cameras to deliver a news conference. A stoic Christopher Wray put his stamp on the report, touting the sections that clear the FBI of systemic bias and promising accountability for agents found to have broken the rules. “Disappointed” was how Wray described his reaction to the report – and he’s right. The IG found problems with a slew of senior FBI officials. The report itself is a grandiose airing of the FBI’s dirty laundry: Internal disagreements, bad decisions, troubling conduct, insubordination and more. The FBI essentially gave itself a bloody nose. But that’s on top off the daily punches that the bureau takes from Trump and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill, and gripes from Democrats still seething over the 2016 election loss. No doubt, it’ll take time for the bureau to pick itself back up. Strzok and Page, long disgraced for their anti-Trump text messages, were slammed as damaging the agency’s reputation and opening the door for the appearance of bias in the Clinton investigation and the Russia investigation as well. It’s difficult to see how Strzok keeps his job. Report defends Clinton The inspector general’s report Thursday solidified that Clinton had not intended to break the law with her handling of classified material on her private email, by exhaustively detailing the steps of the investigation. Despite other issues with Comey, the IG signs off on his ultimate conclusion that Clinton should not be charged. For a full year before the 2016 election, investigators realized they had little evidence in the case against Clinton. But they discussed for months how to end the investigation and communicate that with the public. Comey found solace in the report’s conclusions that the Clinton probe was not biased. “Nothing in the inspector general’s report makes me think we did the wrong thing,” Comey wrote in a New York Times op-ed. 01:48 - Source: CNN DOJ watchdog finds Comey violated FBI norms Fodder for Trump and GOP allies It’s all but assured that the report will not put to rest the charges that Trump and his allies have been sounding for months that Mueller’s investigation was biased against the Republican presidential nominee. The IG report found there was no conspiracy against Trump in the 2016 Clinton investigation, but it detailed a sequence of events that created the ingredients for a conspiracy. Republicans on Capitol Hill have been clamoring for a full accounting of the text messages sent between Strzok and Page, and Thursday’s report showed there were still text messages that had not been provided, including one in which Strzok said “we’ll stop” Trump. Plus, the IG revealed even more FBI officials sent anti-Trump messages, including an FBI attorney on the Mueller team who was removed in February soon after the inspector general provided the texts to Mueller. There’s also numerous issues that this report doesn’t address, from the handling of the Russia investigation itself to issues like how Comey dealt with his memos memorializing his conversations with Trump. Fodder for Clinton and her allies (the mystery month) At the same time, the report provides new details about how the FBI allowed the newly discovered emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop to linger in September and October 2016, while Strzok and other agents were focusing on the Russia investigation. Strzok’s texts were decidedly anti-Trump, and Horowitz wrote he did not have confidence that Strzok was free from bias when he prioritized the Russia investigation over the Weiner emails. But that also set in motion the chain of events that led Comey to announce just before the election that was reopening the Clinton investigation, a step that many Democrats say cost Clinton the election. Comey told the inspector general that, had he known about the laptop in the beginning of October and thought the email review could have been completed before the election, it may have affected his decision to notify Congress. The show that never ends The 2016 election will never end. Mueller and congressional committees are still investigating whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russians. Other congressional panels are probing the same FBI actions in 2016 that were detailed in Thursday’s report. Horowitz himself is still tasked with investigating the FBI’s handling of the Trump-Russia investigation, in which Republicans allege they abused the foreign surveillance process and exhibited bias toward Trump. In Thursday’s report, Horowitz said several times that he did not examine whether bias affected the Russia investigation. That will be a case for another day and another fight over 2016. 02:26 - Source: CNN DOJ: FBI texts create an appearance of bias CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that former FBI employee Lisa Page was not an agent. CNN’s Katelyn Polantz contributed to this report.<doc-sep>The Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General has dropped a 500-page report detailing its investigation into the conduct of FBI personnel, including former FBI Director James Comey, during the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server (code-named "Midyear Exam") and related events just before the 2016 presidential election. The report reveals details of the FBI's internal communications, including an apparent agency-wide distaste for Lync, the mandated official messaging application for the FBI's internal networks. Sure to be a hot summer read for some in Washington, DC, the review does not find fault with the Justice Department's decision not to pursue prosecution of Clinton or members of her staff, and it finds no evidence of political bias. But it does call out Comey and others for violations of policy and calls Comey's decision to independently announce the results of the Clinton investigation as insubordination. Comey immediately responded to the report in a New York Times opinion piece, stating that while he did not agree with all of the OIG conclusions, "I respect the work of his office and salute its professionalism. All of our leaders need to understand that accountability and transparency are essential to the functioning of our democracy, even when it involves criticism. This is how the process is supposed to work." While the report mostly makes recommendations about clarification and adjustment of FBI policies and procedures, the investigators also recommended further review of the actions of some FBI agents who sent text messages with derogatory statements about then-candidate Donald Trump via FBI-owned mobile devices. The heartbreak of autocorrect The OIG inspection requested text messages between members of the Midyear Exam investigation team and found that the FBI retained only five days of messages on its text messaging platform: Microsoft Lync. The team also found that, on several occasions, some of the investigation team—including Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok, who was also involved in the investigation into Russian interference in the election, and FBI attorney Lisa Page—used personal email accounts and devices on some occasions to conduct official business. Both Strzok and Page blamed this largely on the horridness of the auto-completion and autocorrect features on their FBI-issued Samsung phones. Page told investigators: Advertisement [I]n particular, the autocorrect function is the bane of literally every agent of the FBI's existence because those of us who care about spelling and punctuation, which I realize is a nerdy thing to do, makes us crazy because it takes legitimate words that are spelled correctly and autocorrects them into gobbledygook. And so, it is not uncommon for either one of us to just either switch to our personal phones or, or in this case, where it was going to be a fairly substantive thing that he was writing, to just save ourselves the trouble of not doing it on our Samsungs. Because they are horrible and super-frustrating. Strzok also said that he on occasion forwarded documents to his personal computer to view them because he couldn't see the markup in documents or properly edit them on his FBI-issued phone. The OIG investigators referred a decision on Strzok's use of personal email to the FBI for a decision on whether he had violated policy; Page left the FBI in May of 2018. The report also notes that Comey used his own personal Gmail account on occasion for official FBI business. There was no indication that he used it for sensitive information. The OIG took issue with Strzok's and Page's mixing of political expression with work over Microsoft Lync from their phones as well. Strzok was removed from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team last summer when questions were raised about the texts between him and Page, who were having an extramarital affair. The most critical text messages of them all were in an August 8, 2016 exchange: Page stated, "[Trump's] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!" Strzok responded, "No. No he's not. We'll stop it.” As the election approached and then arrived (and passed), the messages became more despondent. November 3, 2016, Page: "The nyt probability numbers are dropping every day. I’m scared for our organization." November 3, 2016, Strzok: "[Jill] Stein and moron [Gary] Johnson are F'ing everything up, too." November 7, 2016, Strzok: Referencing an article entitled "A victory by Mr. Trump remains possible," Strzok stated, "OMG THIS IS F*CKING TERRIFYING." November 13, 2016, Page: "I bought all the president's men. Figure I needed to brush up on Watergate." Several FBI agents who were not named in the report also expressed personal opinions. The OIG investigators wrote: We do not question that the FBI employees who sent these messages are entitled to their own political views. However, we believe using FBI devices to send the messages—particularly the messages that intermix work-related discussions with political commentary—potentially implicate provisions in the FBI's Offense Code and Penalty Guidelines. At a minimum, we found that the employees' use of FBI systems and devices to send the identified messages demonstrated extremely poor judgment and a gross lack of professionalism. We therefore refer this information to the FBI for its handling and consideration of whether the messages sent by the five employees... violated the FBI's Offense Code of Conduct. So many leaks The OIG also found that the FBI was full of leakers, with dozens of FBI agents having regular contact with media. This was not a result of poorly defined policy, the investigators found: "The FBI updated its media policy in November 2017, restating its strict guidelines concerning media contacts, and identifying who is required to obtain authority before engaging members of the media, and when and where to report media contact," the office reported. Advertisement But while the policy itself was "clear and unambiguous," the OIG team blamed a "cultural attitude" within the FBI for blatant disregard for the policy. "Accordingly, we recommend that the FBI evaluate whether (a) it is sufficiently educating its employees about both its media contact policy and the Department's ethics rules and (b) its disciplinary penalties are sufficient to deter such improper conduct." The biggest communications faux-pas collection, however, was credited to Comey. The OIG report was especially critical of Comey's decisions regarding release of information about the Clinton investigation and his decision to publicly announce his finding without discussing it first with Department of Justice leadership: Comey admitted that he concealed his intentions from the Department until the morning of his press conference on July 5 and instructed his staff to do the same, to make it impracticable for Department leadership to prevent him from delivering his statement. We found that it was extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to do so, and we found none of his reasons to be a persuasive basis for deviating from well-established Department policies in a way intentionally designed to avoid supervision by Department leadership over his actions. This conclusion gives some cover after the fact for Comey's dismissal, as does the OIG's conclusions about Comey's letter to members of Congress in late October regarding the Clinton emails found on the laptop of former Congressman Anthony Weiner. Comey sent the letter, he said, because he feared that if the details were not shared before the election, it would have been considered concealing of information to swing the election Clinton's way—and a later disclosure would have tainted her administration. But the OIG team rejected his logic: Comey's description of his choice as being between "two doors," one labeled "speak" and one labeled "conceal," was a false dichotomy. The two doors were actually labeled "follow policy/practice" and "depart from policy/practice." Although we acknowledge that Comey faced a difficult situation with unattractive choices, in proceeding as he did, we concluded that Comey made a serious error of judgment. There's much more to mine from the OIG report. We'll update this story with additional details as we discover them.<doc-sep>A new report by the Justice Department’s inspector general has found little affirmative evidence that political bias affected the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. But the report (which you can read at this link) criticizes several FBI employees involved in the probe for expressing anti-Trump political views in private messages — and it criticizes then-FBI Director James Comey’s unusual decisions to circumvent Justice Department leadership and speak publicly about the case. Regarding the overall handling of the email probe itself, Inspector General Michael Horowitz extensively reviewed decisions about whom the FBI and DOJ interviewed, how they sought evidence, how they decided to grant immunity to certain people, and so on. Without endorsing all these choices, he concluded that overall, they were “not unreasonable” and seemed based on investigative judgment calls — not political bias, as President Trump and many on the right have often asserted. While FBI director Christopher Wray said Thursday afternoon that he was “disappointed” by the report’s findings overall, he did point out that “this report did not find any evidence of political bias or improper considerations actually impacting the investigation under review.” And on two more specific fronts, Horowitz is far more critical. First, he writes, FBI officials involved in the case sent each other messages on their FBI devices “that created the appearance” of political bias. Here, he particularly criticizes FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok for texting his co-worker and lover Lisa Page that “we’ll stop” Trump from winning the election. Horowitz says he found no affirmative evidence that Strzok skewed his decision-making for political reasons. But he says he “did not have confidence” that Strzok’s decision in the campaign’s final month to prioritize the Trump campaign/Russia probe over new Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop “was free from bias.” He writes that Strzok and other FBI employees “brought discredit to themselves” and hurt the bureau’s reputation. Second, Horowitz sharply criticizes then-FBI Director Comey for his public statements about the Clinton email case — specifically, his July 2016 decision to publicly announce that he wouldn’t recommend any charges, and then his October 2016 decision to tell Congress that new emails had been found. Horowitz concluded that while Comey didn’t act out of political bias, he “usurped the authority of the Attorney General,” “chose to deviate” from established procedures, and engaged “in his own subjective, ad hoc decisionmaking.” He writes that the Clinton email case was indeed extremely unusual — but that established procedures “are most important to follow when the stakes are the highest.” So the IG’s two major criticisms cut in different political directions. Those particular FBI agents’ private leanings were anti-Trump, while Comey’s public statements ended up hurting Clinton. The report is more than 500 pages long and there’s much more to it than that, but these are the key takeaways. 1) The investigative decisions in the Clinton email case seemed to be made on the merits, the IG finds When it comes to the overall handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, Horowitz retraced its progress from its opening in July 2015 to its seeming conclusion in the summer of 2016, to try to assess whether the investigative team’s decisions were skewed by political bias — and on the whole, he found little evidence that they were. The context is that there’s been much criticism from the right because investigators often used voluntary processes to get evidence, that they granted certain witnesses immunity, that their interview of Clinton herself was only for show, and that Clinton wasn’t charged for political reasons. Yet in all these cases, Horowitz concludes that investigators’ choices were “not unreasonable.” He says these choices on evidence “were supported by Department and FBI policy and practice,” and that the immunity agreements were given after considering department policy. He also writes that FBI agents “asked Clinton what appeared to be appropriate questions and made use of documents to challenge Clinton’s testimony and assess her credibility during her interview.” And when it comes to the decision not to prosecute Clinton or anyone else in the case, Horowitz writes that he found this was based on prosecutors’ “assessment of the facts, the law, and past Department practice in cases involving these statutes.” He adds, “We did not identify evidence of bias or improper considerations.” Horowitz does have certain criticisms — for instance, he says that two Clinton lawyers who were also fact witnesses in the case probably shouldn’t have been allowed to sit in on the FBI’s interview with Clinton. And he says he’s not necessarily endorsing any of these decisions as the best ones possible. But, he writes, his goal is to assess whether they were “based on considerations other than the merits of the investigation.” And for the most part, he didn’t find evidence otherwise. “We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed,” Horowitz writes. 2) Some FBI officials expressed anti-Trump opinions in private messages — and Horowitz finds Peter Strzok’s particularly concerning Yet Horowitz writes that he was “concerned” in finding private messages exchanged by several FBI employees, on FBI devices, in which they either disparaged Trump or expressed their support for Clinton. In addition to the well-publicized texts between affair-having FBI co-workers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, Horowitz writes that three other bureau employees involved in the case — two agents who were dating and ended up getting married, and an FBI attorney — sometimes mixed discussions of the Clinton email investigations with their own political opinions. It is Strzok, though, whom he singles out for the most scrutiny. He is particularly concerned about an August 8, 2016, message in which, in response to a text from Page expressing fear that Trump would win the election, Strzok wrote back: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” This, Horowitz wrote, is “not only indicative of a biased state of mind” but implies “a willingness to take official action to impact a presidential candidate’s electoral prospects” — something he calls “antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Department of Justice.” 3) The IG asks whether Strzok pursued the Trump-Russia probe more vigorously than new Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop due to political bias Now, Horowitz also writes that Strzok had at times pushed for more aggressive measures in the Clinton email probe than other investigators preferred. And he has little objection to Strzok‘s conduct in the Clinton probe through most of 2016. However, Horowitz does express concern about a choice Strzok made late in the campaign to prioritize the Trump campaign/Russia investigation over investigating new Hillary Clinton emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. The Weiner emails were found by the FBI in late September, yet agents took no action on them for several weeks, stretching into late October. This is the background for the very late letter by Comey, just a week and a half before the election, announcing that the new emails were found. “We searched for evidence that the Weiner laptop was deliberately placed on the back-burner by others in the FBI to protect Clinton, but found no evidence in emails, text messages, instant messages, or documents that suggested an improper purpose,” Horowitz writes. However, he adds, “we also did not identify a consistent or persuasive explanation for the FBI’s failure to act for almost a month.” “Under these circumstances, we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the Midyear-related investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop was free from bias,” he writes. 4) Horowitz sharply criticizes Comey for deviating from policy and procedure in his statements about the Clinton case Finally, Horowitz singles out Comey for some tough criticism as well. “In key moments, then Director Comey chose to deviate from the FBI’s and the Department’s established procedures and norms and instead engaged in his own subjective, ad hoc decisionmaking,” he writes. There are two main examples here. First is Comey’s July 2016 public announcement that he wouldn’t recommend charges against anyone in the Clinton email case (which he coupled with criticism of Clinton for being “extremely careless”).<doc-sep>
WASHINGTON — There's a choose-your-own-adventure quality to the Justice Department Inspector General's Office report on the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. For Republicans who believe President Donald Trump is the victim of a "deep state" effort to undermine his campaign and his presidency, there are text messages from FBI agent Peter Strzok to his lover that contain anti-Trump sentiment — including that they would "stop" him from becoming president — and plenty of data points to suggest former FBI Director James Comey deserved to be fired for his conduct, rather than as an attempt to obstruct an investigation into his campaign's ties to Russia. For Democrats, the report acknowledges there's no evidence that pro-Clinton political bias drove decision-making; makes clear that the bad calls within the FBI and the DOJ, including Comey's breaks with protocol, tended to harm Clinton, not Trump; and, perhaps most important, concludes that the methodology of the Clinton investigation — and the decision not to prosecute her — was sound. The most compelling finding, one marbled throughout the 568-page report and which gives a sense of vindication to both sides, is that Comey repeatedly substituted his own judgment for department policy in making highly sensitive decisions to publicly reveal information about the Clinton probe. "The IG Report is a total disaster for Comey, his minions and sadly, the FBI," Trump wrote in a tweetstorm on the IG report Friday morning. "Comey will now officially go down as the worst leader, by far, in the history of the FBI. I did a great service to the people in firing him. Good Instincts. Christopher Wray will bring it proudly back!" Specifically, the IG faulted Comey for going rogue by holding a news conference in which he discussed the particulars of a case against a person — Clinton — who wasn't going to be prosecuted, and for failing to directly discuss with Justice Department leaders his decision to inform Congress roughly two weeks before the election that he was essentially re-opening the case to look at Clinton emails found on former Rep. Anthony Weiner's laptop. "We concluded that Comey's unilateral announcement was inconsistent with department policy and violated long-standing department practice and protocol by, among other things, criticizing Clinton's uncharged conduct," the IG's office wrote at one point. "Much like with his July 5 announcement, we found that in making this decision, Comey engaged in ad hoc decision-making based on his personal views even if it meant rejecting longstanding department policy or practice," the IG's office wrote of the laptop call. Comey, naturally, begged to differ. "I do not agree with all of the inspector general’s conclusions, but I respect the work of his office and salute its professionalism," Comey wrote in a New York Times op-ed Thursday. "All of our leaders need to understand that accountability and transparency are essential to the functioning of our democracy, even when it involves criticism. This is how the process is supposed to work." He also pointed to two conclusions that he implied gave him comfort: The IG concluded there was no evidence of improper action in the investigation of Clinton — and that the decision not to prosecute Clinton was reasonable, as the IG wrote, "based on the prosecutors’ assessment of the facts, the law, and past department practice." In an exchange with reporters at the White House Friday, Trump bristled at the report's finding that prosecutors were not influenced by political bias. "That wasn't the correct opinion, and that was ridiculous," Trump said, as he implied that he had read the lengthy report. "That was the most biased set of circumstances I've ever seen in my life. Honestly, to read it was very sad." While the report does not in and of itself explore the question of whether Comey's firing could amount to an effort by Trump to obstruct justice, it does provide evidence that his dismissal could have been warranted for other reasons. Indeed, its conclusions reflect the case that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made in a May 9, 2017, letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions advocating for the removal of Comey based on his handling of the Clinton probe, and a contemporary letter Sessions wrote to Trump making the same recommendation.