Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified for more than seven hours in front of two House committees last week. The transcript of the session is roughly 61,000 words long. So it is no surprise that some key moments were missed in the initial reporting and discussion.
Now, some members of the House are looking at a brief exchange between Horowitz and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. Nadler appeared to want Horowitz to declare that there was no bias in the FBI’s investigation of President Trump. Horowitz quite pointedly declined to go along.
Nadler read several Trump tweets and statements to Horowitz. One was from the president’s June 15 interview with Fox News, in which Trump said of the FBI, “They were plotting against my election.” If Nadler hoped Horowitz would knock that down, it didn’t happen.
“Last week, the president said that the FBI, quote, ‘plotted against his election,’ close quote, and that your report shows “total bias” — in quotes — at the FBI against the president and in favor of Secretary Clinton,” Nadler said to Horowitz. “Did your investigation uncover evidence of an FBI plot against the president’s election?”
Horowitz could have said something short and simple like, “No.” Instead, he answered, “I think the — those August text messages reflect individuals suggesting that they could take action based on their beliefs.”
The “individuals” to whom Horowitz referred were apparently FBI officials Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and a few others mentioned in the IG report.
Nadler tried again, this time in hopes Horowitz would say that whatever some agents’ personal feelings, there was no anti-Trump bias in FBI decisions in the Trump investigation.
“But your report also said that they did not in fact — that the FBI’s decisions were not influenced by that,” Nadler said.
“If we’re focused on midyear, on the Clinton investigation, that’s correct,” Horowitz answered. “That’s what we found as to the decision to decline back in July [2016].”
That is the exchange that is retroactively catching lawmakers’ attention. By beginning with, “If we’re focused on midyear, on the Clinton investigation,” Horowitz carefully limited his bias-did-not-affect-decisions claim to the “midyear review” — the FBI’s name for the Clinton investigation — and specifically did not rule out bias as an influence on FBI decisions in the Trump-Russia probe.
“The key phrase is, ‘If we’re focused on midyear,'” noted Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a Judiciary Committee member, in a conversation Monday. “That’s as if to say, ‘but if you’re looking at the Russia thing, I’m not so sure.'”
“The qualifier language says it all,” Jordan continued. “It doesn’t take much to read between the lines and say [Horowitz] does feel that bias could have manifested itself in the Trump-Russia investigation.”
Other lawmakers say the Nadler-Horowitz exchange is consistent with other information that Congress is gathering on the Trump-Russia investigation. And Horowitz said things that could be interpreted similarly the day before, when he testified before the Senate.
Finally, Nadler tried one last time to get Horowitz to dismiss the issue of anti-Trump bias in the Trump-Russia probe. “Did your investigation find that the FBI is totally biased against President Trump?” Nadler asked.
“We lay out here what we found on bias, what we did,” Horowitz answered, “at least as to certain individuals, we had concerns about what their texts indicated.”
The bottom line is that the question of bias in the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation is quite open. Horowitz made clear many times in his testimony that his report did not cover the Trump-Russia probe, with the exception of some events in October 2016.
And when, someday, the evidence Horowitz is now gathering on the Trump-Russia investigation becomes public, the question will not be whether Strzok and some others in the FBI were biased against Trump. That is already known. The question will be whether that bias shaped the investigation and, perhaps, the FBI’s actions.
