Republican lawmakers chided the head of the FBI on Monday for “kid-glove treatment” of Hillary Clinton during its investigation into her email server and wondered if special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has been tainted by bias.
“The Justice Department faces a serious credibility problem because millions of Americans suspect there is a double standard. They see a story of kid-glove treatment for one side and bare-knuckle tactics for the other. They see politics in that story,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said during a hearing, referring to how the FBI handled the Clinton and Trump-Russia investigations.
[Related: FBI to require political bias training after damaging IG report]
Monday’s hearing was the first congressional one — featuring Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and FBI Director Christopher Wray — following the release of Thursday’s IG report.
Horowitz’s report found that though bias was rampant among top FBI officials for part of the Clinton investigation, it ultimately did not hinder it.
[Byron York: How political bias infected FBI Trump, Clinton investigations]
The committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, countered Grassley by saying the bias actually hurt Clinton’s campaign.
“Both investigations were ongoing during the presidential election, but only the Clinton investigation was discussed publicly. This unquestionably harmed candidate Clinton and helped candidate Trump,” the California Democrat said.
“If the FBI were trying to throw the election to Hillary Clinton, they could not have done a worse job,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. “Every single misstep by the FBI damaged Hillary Clinton and helped Donald Trump.”
Grassley and other Republicans on the panel seized on the text messages sent between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page, who exchanged anti-Trump, pro-Clinton sentiments while working on the email investigation.
The two were also part of Mueller’s team before leaving due to the discovery of the messages.
“If the inspector general had not discovered their anti-Trump texts, they would still be there today,” Grassley said. “They would still be investigating the Trump campaign.”
“Remember these facts every time you hear the press or my friends on the other side of the aisle claim that this report found ‘no bias,'” he added. “You may hear that talking point a lot today, but don’t be fooled.”
“I’m glad you found what you found, Mr. Horowitz. I’m not buying that the Clinton email investigation was on the up and up,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.. “The lead investigator clearly did not want to see Donald Trump elected president of the United States. If they found Hillary Clinton was criminally liable, that paves the way for Donald Trump.”
Graham added: “I think there was a lot of bias that did affect an investigation that is to me almost impossible to explain.”
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said the findings in the report “call into question the credibility of the whole Clinton email investigation and cast a cloud over the Russia investigation.”
“I share the concerns, and we wrote, in fact, here that it did cast a cloud over the entire Clinton email investigation,” Horowitz said.
“And the Russia investigation?” Cornyn replied.
“Well, we haven’t reached a conclusion on that,” Horowitz said.
Horowitz later told Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., that the report “does not touch on the Russia investigation.”
“We did not address the credibility of the special counsel’s investigation here,” he said.
But Wray defended the integrity of the Russia investigation more outright, which Mueller took over in May 2017.
“Senator, as I said to you last month and as I said before, I do not believe special counsel Mueller is on a witch hunt,” Wray told Leahy, who asked if he had “any reason to believe this investigation has been discredited.”
