As everyone tries to read their pet narrative into the Inspector General’s report on the conduct of the FBI top leadership, all 500 pages of it, Lawfare‘s team, led by Benjamin Wittes, has their own sober take on it. I found this particularly interesting:
First, the report validates the essential integrity of the investigation. It offers no reason to believe that, in the main, the Clinton email investigation was not a genuine effort by the FBI to learn the facts and apply the law to them in a fashion consistent with Justice Department policy and practice. This point will tend to get lost in the politics of competitive victimization, in which the Clinton forces want to blame their candidate’s ultimate electoral defeat on the bureau and the president wants to ascribe to federal law enforcement a “deep state” conspiracy to conduct a “WITCH HUNT!” against him and go easy on his opponent’s “crimes.” But it is actually the critical starting place. For all that the document finds fault with the bureau—disagreeing with key judgments, accusing the FBI director of “insubordination,” and charging individual agents and employees of “cast[ing] a cloud” over the agency—it never questions that the FBI as an institution was pursuing its proper mission: conducting a serious investigation in good faith.
Second, and relatedly, the IG broadly concludes that the investigation’s judgments were not influenced by politics. Time after time, when the inspector general evaluates how individual decisions were made, he concludes that there were legitimate reasons for the manner in which the FBI obtained evidence and interviewed witnesses—reasons that were consistent with past practice and with Justice Department policy. There are some important caveats: The IG’s office questions the decision to let Clinton be interviewed in the presence of two of her lawyers—a decision the report describes as “inconsistent with typical investigative strategy,” though it notes that there is “no persuasive evidence” their presence “influenced Clinton’s interview.” More importantly, as we discuss below, the inspector general was rightly disturbed by the highly political text-message exchanges between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok. Even here, though, the investigation “did not find evidence to connect the political views expressed in these messages to the specific investigative decisions that we reviewed.” Those steps, the investigation finds, were made by a larger team and “were not unreasonable.” More broadly, although the report is unsparing toward Comey, it finds explicitly that his actions were not influenced by political preferences.
In other words, despite the absurd accusations of there being some sort of Deep State out to get Trump, the FBI performed in the proper manner, politically speaking: that is, they performed a-politically. This should be vastly reassuring to independents as well as all citizens who understand the importance of law enforcement agencies being immune to the political winds. This is clearly a concept that does not impinge on the consciousness of President Trump nor his political cronies.
I am not going to take the time to read the report myself, so I don’t know if the Inspector General’s office, which reportedly criticized Comey’s behavior as FBI Director for departing from Department of Justice policies and practices, actually ventured to set forth its recommended decisions. For me, it seemed as if the FBI faced a very unpalatable situation, and did the best that Comey & Co could do. It would be interesting to see a full recommendation & justification from the IG, and then compare it to Comey’s decisions.
Speaking of former Director Comey, he had a deliciously innocently nasty response to the IG’s report in an Op-Ed in The New York Times:
I do not agree with all of the inspector general’s conclusions, but 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.
His target is not the Inspector General’s office. It’s not the Administration. It’s all the amateurs who think they know better than the professionals who’ve trained and spent long hours thinking about how to best fairly govern.
Unlike Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), a Trump ally who felt the need to hurriedly rush to judgment on Twitter (his choice of communications service may itself be a judgment on him):
The FBI didn’t want Trump to be President. Peter Stzrok’s text says “we’ll stop it.” The day after the election, FBI Attorney #2 said he was “stressed about what I could have done differently.” 2 weeks later he said “Viva le resistance.
An error easily avoided: confusing one man’s personal opinion for the official opinion of those in charge. Note that no one else, with perhaps the exception of his lover, in a liberal reading, was noted for such sentiments. I haven’t noted Rep. Jordan before, but I think, in the future, I shan’t be trusting his judgment much. Just another frenzied cultist with no real analytical capabilities, just the compulsion to defend da leader and attack “the enemy.”
