Early Leaks About IG Report Indicate That It's a Whitewash

I pretty much expected this.

It claims there was no political bias shown by Strzok and Page (!), faults Comey for discussing Hillary's crimes but not for absolving her of crimes, and finds fault with Lynch for not talking to Comey.

That's the claim -- that Lynch wasn't talking to him through this period.

Maybe these are the quotes that are exciting liberal reporters -- so maybe the full report (which will be released at 3pm) is more honest, but so far, it's not looking good. And Bloomberg claims they obtained all the conclusions in the report. So my hope that maybe these are just the conclusions Democrat congressmen wanted to leak seems to be a false hope.

Former FBI Director James Comey "deviated" from bureau and Justice Department procedures in handling the probe into Hillary Clinton, damaging the agencies’ image of impartiality even though he wasn’t motivated by politics, the department’s watchdog found in a highly anticipated report.

"While we did not find that these decisions were the result of political bias on Comey’s part, we nevertheless concluded that by departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the department as fair administrators of justice," Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in the report's conclusions, which were obtained by Bloomberg News.

Although the report being sent to Congress on Thursday doesn’t deal with the origins of the probe into Russia meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and possible collusion with those around President Donald Trump, the president and his Republican allies in Congress were primed to seize on it as evidence of poor judgment and anti-Trump bias within the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department.

Republicans, always seizing.

...

Some of what Horowitz discovered has already been made public, and Trump and Republican lawmakers have pounced on those findings in an effort to discredit Comey and, by extension, the investigation now being run by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Seizing when they're not pouncing.

...

Republican critics seized on previous revelations from the inspector general that two FBI officials who worked on Mueller's Russia investigation, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, exchanged text messages sharply critical of Trump. Mueller removed Strzok from the inquiry after the texts were discovered, and Page has since left the FBI.

One example cited in the new report is an email exchange between Strzok and Page on Aug. 8, 2016. Page questioned whether Trump would become president. Strzok replied: "No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it."

But Horowitz said in the report to be issued Thursday that "we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative actions we reviewed." Still, he wrote that "the conduct by these employees cast a cloud over the entire FBI investigation."

Horowitz found a "troubling lack of any direct, substantive communication" between Comey and Attorney General Lynch ahead of Comey's July 5 press conference on Clinton and his October 28 letter to Congress.

"We found it extraordinary that, in advance of two such consequential decisions, the FBI director decided that the best course of conduct was to not speak directly and substantively with the attorney general about how best to navigate those decisions."

Will the Democrats and media be seizing and/or pouncing on this whitewash?

posted by Ace of Spades at 12:25 PM

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