DOJ releases DAMNING report on FBI handling of Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation

The Associated Press on Thursday, June 14th, announced early in the morning that the Justice Department released its long-awaited report. Compiled by Inspector General David Horowitz, the 568 page report details the investigation into the practices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under Director James Comey in regard to the matter of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server and her compromise of classified information through the use of a non-secure server.

Here are some of the findings:

• The Justice Department faulted former FBI director Comey with breaking with the established protocol numerous times in his handling of the Clinton e-mail investigation. However, it also found his decisions not driven by political bias.
• The report faulted Mr. Comey for using a person Gmail account for FBI business numerous times while warning his own employees against this practice.
• The report criticizes Mr. Comey for not keeping AG Loretta Lynch and other Justice Dept superiors properly informed about his handling of the investigation.
• Further, he was criticized for usurping the power of AG Lynch in his handling of the investigation.
• The report further faulted Mr. Comey for alerting Congress days before the 2016 election that the investigation was being re-opened because of newly discovered e-mails.
• An FBI investigator who worked on the probes into Clinton’s e-mails and into Russian interference in the 2016 election told an FBI lawyer “we’ll stop” Donald Trump from becoming President.
• The texts, between investigator Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page pointedly noted this intent. According to the report, Page texted Strzok in August 2016: “(Trump’s) not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”Strzok responded: “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”
  
• The Weekly Standard made note of the attitude of two other unnamed FBI agents (also in a romantic relationship) that is quite significant:

“Agent 5 sent an instant message to Agent 1 on February 9, 2016, griping about the Midyear work she was being given to do. Agent 1 messaged back to commiserate: “Yeah, I hear you. You guys have a [expletive deleted] task, in a [expletive deleted] environment,” he wrote. “To look for something conjured in a place where you cant find it, for a case that doesnt matter and is predestined. [sic]” It’s bad enough that a lead agent on the Clinton case was convinced the outcome was “predestined,” but there’s more in Agent 1’s description of the culture they were operating in: “DOJ comes in there every once in awhile and takes a wishy-washy, political, cowardice stance. Salt meets wound. That is the environment love. Can’t sugar coat it.” At least he followed by telling his girlfriend to “do the best you can.”

That sounds like a frank and honest description of a politically skewed shop. But when asked about that message, Agent 1 had another message altogether for the IG: “I have no information that [the Clinton investigation] was a pre-determined outcome by anyone.” No, of course not.

But back in the day, Agent 1 was adamant that the fix was in. Take his January 2016 message to Agent 4 proclaiming “What we want to do and what we’re going to be allowed to do are two different things.” Asked about that quote by the IG, Agent 1 suffered a temporary bout of amnesia, unable to remember what he had been talking about. What he did know was that he had merely been “venting.”

• Finally, the Inspector General identified a number of instances where FBI employees regularly spoke with members of the media and received a number of free perks from journalists, including meals and tickets to various events.On page XII in the report, the IG says the department “identified numerous FBI employees, at all levels of the organization and with no official reason to be in contact with the media, who were nevertheless in frequent contact with reporters.”The IG expressed “profound concerns bout the volume and extent of unauthorized media contacts by FBI personnel that we have uncovered our review.”The contact between FBI agents and the media extended to receiving “improperly receiving benefits from reporters, including tickets to sporting events, golfing outings, drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social events.In the following paragraph, the IG implied that such benefits could have encouraged various agents to leak information to the press.

“The harm caused by leaks, fear of potential leaks, and a culture of unauthorized media contacts is illustrated in Chapters Ten and Eleven of our report, where we detail the fact that these issues influenced FBI officials who were advising Comey on consequential investigative decisions in October 2016,” the report states.

The IG is unambiguous in its opinion that the problem with leaking is not “with the FBI’s policy, which we found to be clear and unambiguous.” Instead, the leaking phenomenon “appears to be a cultural attitude among many in the organization.”

At the time of this article more and more revelations continue to surface from the report that are quite damning indeed. the findings shown above are just a select first few.

So the upshot so far is that Comey himself was not faulted by the Justice Department with bias. However many people who were working on the investigation, namely Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page and our aforementioned unnamed agents 1 and 5, clearly were biased, and from the nature of their communication, that bias was strong enough to influence their actions. It also appears that they did deliberately act in a manner to carry out that bias and to, in effect, let their own personal politics influence the outcome of the investigation.

Further, the FBI itself was compromised by the cozy relationships between agents and reports, with the possibility, even likelihood, that this promoted leaking to the press when there should have been none.

The White House commented on this on Thursday afternoon, saying that the report reaffirmed the President’s “suspicions” about the conduct of former FBI Director Comey.

The findings may not seem all that damning to look at, but they are actually indicative of a compromised bureau that is far from the ideals of integrity and non-partisanship that the FBI has long claimed as its foundation.

Rush Limbaugh has often commented on this nature of the Deep State, which is evident in the findings of the IG report. He points out that such people, embedded in the government by liberal politicians, namely President Obama, do not need to actually be conspirators to be effective in controlling the actions of the government. Their own ideologies run their decision-making process, and so for them there is no need to really coordinate their efforts when they are all basically aligned the same way.

This report appears to cast some light on the reality of this statement. Strzok and Page may not have taken their angst into an active conspiracy. But they didn’t have to. All they had to so was keep operating with their bias as their driving force. And although James Comey may not have expressly chosen his actions based on his support for Hillary Clinton, he did give her unwarranted and inconsistent special treatment, granting her a pass where others have gone to jail on far less serious offenses.

A link to the full IG report from the US Justice Department is available here. The report is lengthy and extremely detailed – some 568 pages. It is likely there will be more to be discussed as the report is fully analyzed.