
IG Finds That Former FBI Director Comey was “Insubordinate” During Tenure
The full report from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General is due to be released to Congress any day now, but leaks from the report are already hitting the press. The first of them was reported by ABC News on Wednesday. They revealed that within the pages of the report, IG Michael Horowitz determined that former FBI Director James Comey had defied authority and been outright “insubordinate” at time during his tenure at the top of the Bureau.
But Comey is not the only Obama-era official who is set to take a pounding in the long-awaited report.
“In the draft report, Inspector General Michael Horowitz also rebuked former Attorney General Loretta Lynch for her handling of the federal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s personal email server,” ABC News reports.
Conservatives crying out for justice over the clearly-botched and politically-motivated outcome of the Clinton case have been waiting, with varying degrees of patience, for the final report to be released. President Donald Trump is one of those for whom patience is running thin. In a tweet on Tuesday, the president expressed his desire to see the report sooner rather than later.
“What is taking so long with the Inspector General’s report on Crooked Hillary and Slippery James Comey?” he asked. “Hope report is not being changed and made weaker!”
This is a significant possibility; currently a draft of the report is being circulated to members of the Justice Department, including many of the people Horowitz names and shames as part of the inquiry. These people will have an opportunity to request edits to the report prior to its being released to Congress and the public.
We will have to wait for the full report to find out exactly how James Comey defied authority while serving as FBI director, but ABC said that he was specifically “called out for ignoring objections from the Justice Department when he disclosed in a letter to Congress just days before the 2016 presidential election that FBI agents had reopened the Clinton probe.”
We certainly hope this is not indicative of the direction Horowitz’s report takes, because you can simply read Crooked Hillary’s memoir of the campaign if you want to hear a bunch of whining about things like that. Fact remains: If she hadn’t broken the rules of classification willingly and repeatedly, she wouldn’t have had to worry about any letters from Comey.
We’re much more interested in how the FBI came to the conclusion that no prosecution was warranted in Clinton’s case, given how everyone, including Comey himself, admitted that she was in violation of the law. If this report does not shed light on those important matters, then it’s not worth the paper it was printed on.