No Courage Found in Overdue Inspector General’s Report

We do not agree with the mainstream media in saying that the overdue report on the Hillary Clinton investigation turned out to be a “dud,” but we were extremely disappointed with some of the conclusions reached by Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

We’re sure Horowitz is a fine fellow who did his best, but we’d really liked to have seen what this report looked like before the grabbyhands at the FBI and the Justice Department started mucking it up. Because you could take a great deal of this report – the content, not the conclusions – and write up something very, very different than the weak, cowardly document we put our eyes on last week.

This report went to extraordinary lengths to both document and then excuse an agency that was rife with anti-Trump, pro-Clinton bias from the very top of the tree. Two things cannot exist at one time: A fair investigation and an investigation run by (and supervised by) people who want desperately to protect the likely Democratic candidate for president.

Yet that’s the premise that we’re asked to accept. That yes, the FBI agents in charge of this investigation really, really hated Donald Trump and really, really wanted Hillary Clinton to be the next president. That yes, James Comey started exonerating Clinton long before all the facts were in (and indeed, long before she was even interviewed). But in spite of all that, everything was fine and none of it actually affected the investigation in any way.

That doesn’t feed the dog.

“We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed,” reads the report. “We found that these specific decisions were the result of discretionary judgments made during the course of an investigation by the Midyear agents and prosecutors and that these judgment calls were not unreasonable.”

These are the statements written by a man who is not willing to exhibit the intestinal fortitude it would take to forcefully and righteously condemn the FBI and the Justice Department for screwing this investigation seven ways to Sunday. Horowitz was willing to document the near-traitorous actions of the FBI in his 500+ page report, but he didn’t have the guts to follow the facts to their unavoidable conclusions. He choked, in other words. He choked, and now the Mueller investigation and all other fruits of this poisonous tree will be allowed to ripen at the expense of our democracy.