Fallout from last week’s Justice Department inspector general report is expected to reach into this week, as Michael Horowitz is slated to testify on Capitol Hill.
Horowitz will be joined by FBI Director Christopher Wray on Monday when they testify in the afternoon before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding Thursday’s report. Horowitz then goes before a joint House Judiciary-House Oversight Committee hearing Tuesday morning.
The near 600-page report released Thursday was a culmination of an 18-month long investigation into the FBI’s actions during its 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
Horowitz’s report singled out then-FBI Director James Comey, saying the actions he took during the Clinton probe were “extraordinary and insubordinate.”
Horowitz declared that Comey made a “serious error of judgment” when he sent a letter to Congress in October 2016 — days before the election — to notify lawmakers that the FBI was reopening the Clinton investigation, which he had declared closed at a news conference four months earlier.
The July 2016 news conference was also criticized by Horowitz, who found a “troubling lack of any direct, substantive communication” between Comey and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch ahead of the July 5 spectacle.
The FBI ordinarily does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations.
Trump and his allies have often alleged there is a “deep state” conspiracy at the Justice Department and FBI, and though the report does not provide credence to a wide-spread secret operation, it does identify five FBI officials whose private communications indicated personal biases.
Horowitz singled out FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page for a slew of anti-Trump, pro-Clinton text messages that he said “potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions were impacted by bias or improper considerations.”
Strzok and Page — the two were having an affair and have already seen most of their text messages publicly released — did have a text message exchange that Horowitz said showed “willingness to take official action” to prevent Trump from becoming president.
“[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Page wrote to Strzok in August 2016.
“No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” Strzok replied.
Strzok and Page were part of the Clinton investigation before being assigned to the Russia investigation and stayed on it when it was handed over to special counsel Robert Mueller. When Mueller found out about the messages, both were removed from the team, sometime during the summer of 2017. Page is no longer with the FBI, but Strzok is employed there — which has become a topic of controversy among some politicos.
The report identifies another FBI attorney — dubbed “FBI Attorney 2” — as “the primary FBI attorney assigned to (the Russia) investigation beginning in early 2017.”
The report says the attorney left the Mueller investigation in late February 2018, shortly after the inspector general provided Mueller with some of the messages discovered.
After Election Day, “FBI Attorney 2” wrote that he was “so stressed about what I could have done differently.” He also wrote to a colleague, “I just can’t imagine the systematic disassembly of the progress we made over the last 8 years.”
But, the IG concluded “no evidence that the conclusions by the prosecutors were affected by bias or other improper considerations.”
At a news conference Thursday, Wray said he accepted the findings and insisted “nothing in the report impugns the integrity of our workforce as a whole or the FBI as an institution.”
Congressional Republicans are still chomping at the bit to ask Horowitz and Wray questions.
“I’ve been saying there’s not a deep state,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. said Friday. “Then, I look at this, and I see the people who are conducting the investigation of one political candidate versus the other, seem to have a very — not just a political opinion — but a motivation. So that’s why we’re going to have a hearing.”
Graham, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Horowitz “will be challenged about his conclusion” at the hearing Monday.
“The report also conclusively shows an alarming and destructive level of animus displayed by top officials at the FBI. Peter Strzok’s manifest bias trending toward animus casts a pall on this investigation,” said House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., in a statement, saying Comey’s actions harmed “the credibility of the investigation” as well as “the public’s ability to rely on the results of the investigation.”
