
Trump on Hillary Report: “What is Taking So Long?”
President Trump is growing impatient waiting for the Justice Department’s Inspector General to release his comprehensive report in the Hillary Clinton email investigation. The bombshell report, as written by IG Michael Horowitz, was widely expected to be published publicly by the end of May. Now, a few days into June, the president and others are wondering if Horowitz isn’t doing some last minute editing that would soften the blow.
“What is taking so long with the Inspector General’s Report on Crooked Hillary and Slippery James Comey?” Trump asked on Twitter. “Numerous delays. Hope report is not being changed and made weaker! There are so many horrible things to tell, the public has the right to know. Transparency!”
The public has been waiting, with varying degrees of patience, for this report since at least the beginning of May, when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that it should be expected imminently.
“I anticipate that our Inspector General will complete a comprehensive, fair and nonpartisan report that answers many questions about how the Department of Justice handled a high-profile investigation during the last presidential campaign,” Rosenstein said on May 4. “We will learn from it, and our Department will do better in the future.”
The way Rosenstein framed that last sentence, you don’t have to be The Amazing Kreskin to realize that there are going to be some uncomfortable allegations made in Horowitz’s report. Those allegations are likely to leave Comey, his buddy Andrew McCabe, and perhaps even some people higher up the Obama food chain scrambling for shelter. Critics on both sides of the political divide have their problems with the way the email investigation was handled; we’re about to find out just how badly it was botched. And why.
In an interview with Fox News on Monday night, Sen. Lindsey Graham said that while the IG report was not an acceptable substitute for a second independent counsel, he figured there were plenty of people within the “top level of the FBI” who needed to be worried about Horowitz’s findings.
“I think McCabe needs to be worried,” he said. “I think Comey needs to be worried. I think these two FBI agents who were in the tank for Clinton and hated Trump needs to be worried. And at the end of the day, what we — what have we found is that the two FBI agents involved in looking at the Clinton e-mail investigation had a thumb on the scale. For Clinton against Trump.”
Graham is right about one thing: Whatever this report finds out about the Hillary Clinton case, it will not quell concerns about FISA abuse, the spying that was done on Trump’s campaign, or the use the FBI made of a phony dossier in bending the laws of privacy. This report will only mark the beginning – not the end – of the inquiry into the Obama administration’s 2016 misdeeds.