COMERICA PARK, Detroit – There will be a lot to unpack about this report in the hours and days to come. The media’s chosen headline is that DOJ Inspector General found “no bias” in the decision not to charge Hillary Clinton in the e-mail fiasco, although it smacked James Comey hard for his handling of the matter. It’s a 500-page report, and you can read the whole thing here.
Given the many irregularities we know occurred in the FBI’s investigation of Hillary’s schlock, homebrew e-mail server, I can’t wait to dive into Horowitz’s explanation for why there was no bias – and furthermore, for why we shouldn’t think Obama and Lynch spiked the investigation from the outset. But we can deal with that later.
What we do know is that Horowitz has said in his report what should have been obvious by now: Too many people in the FBI hated Donald Trump, and were prepared to abuse their positions in federal law enforcement solely to try to stop him from winning the election:
Perhaps most damning to FBI credibility, investigators found that Peter Strzok, who served as a lead investigator on both the Trump-Russia and Clinton email investigations, vowed he would “stop” Trump from becoming president in an August 2016 text message to his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page.
“[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page wrote to Strzok.
“No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Strzok responded.
Strzok said the message “was intended to reassure Page that Trump would not be elected, not to suggest that he would do something to impact the investigation,” according to the report.
Of course, everyone knows Strzok and Page were doing this. What we need to dig in and see further is the extent to which others in the FBI were complicit in the effort. For example, what exactly was the “insurance policy” Strzok and Page discussed with “Andy” – presumably Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who has since been fired for unauthorized media leaks?
Also, if there was no bias in the Hillary investigation, why were Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills allowed to claim attorney-client privilege in some interviews, even though they were material witnesses and were interviewed themselves under oath? And why were Abedin and Mills allowed to retain and destroy their own hard drives?
All the headlines have covered is that Comey and Lynch were irresponsible in their public actions, because of the way it made their roles look to the public. Yeah. We already knew that.
We’ll keep digging in the hours to come. And you should too.
