There’s going to be a lot of chatter about the Justice Department Inspector General’s report on its investigation of the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email probe. But I’ve reviewed the executive summary (not the whole 500 page report) and suggest that we all remain grounded in the most important finding.
On July 6th, one day after Comey excoriated Clinton for being “extremely careless” during his announcement that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges against her based on the evidence they had uncovered, federal prosecutors formally declined to press charges. The IG reviewed that decision and described its process.
We did not substitute the OIG’s judgement for the judgements made by the Department, but rather sought to determine whether the decision was based on improper considerations, including political bias.
Here is their conclusion:
We found no evidence that the conclusions by the prosecutors were affected by bias or other improper considerations; rather, we determined that they were based on the prosecutors’ assessment of the facts, the law, and past Department practice.
In other words, for all the chants of “lock her up,” the IG just reported that the decision to not charge Clinton with any crimes was correct. End. of. story.
They even went a step further.
As we also describe in Chapter Twelve, we learned during the course of our review that Comey, Strzok, and Page used their personal email accounts to conduct FBI business.
In other words, Comey was committing the very same offense for which Clinton was being investigated. Isn’t that rich?
In a sane world, that would put this whole nonsense to rest. Oh, how I wish we were living in a sane world!
