Director: FBI won’t repeat mistakes noted in watchdog report

There are no winners in Thursday’s release of the 500-page Justice Department inspector general report on the FBI’s actions during the 2016 election.

The records of the messages were published in a report from the Department of Justice’s inspector general, which conducted an internal review of the FBI’s handling of the inquiry into the Clinton email investigation. This obliviousness is a version is of the old line, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz said he was “deeply troubled” by these missives, including one text exchange in which a senior Federal Bureau of Investigation official asks: Trump’s “not ever going to become president, right?”

Both Strzok and Page worked on the Clinton probe. Both briefly served on the special counsel’s investigation in 2017, Page in a 45-day temporary position and Strzok before being removed in July 2017 after the inspector general had discovered some of his text messages. In one case, a male agent and a female agent who are now married exchanged messages in which the female agent called Trump’s OH supporters “retarded” and later messaged, “f– Trump”.

If Wray truly wanted to clean house, he’d order full transparency.

Horowitz said that the report focused on the FBI’s handling of the Clinton investigation and only briefly “touched on” the Russian Federation investigation when investigators brought the text messages between Strzok and Page to the attention of the special counsel and learned that Strzok wanted to prioritize the Russian Federation investigation over the Clinton probe. The obstruction of Congressional oversight and Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuits shows that rather than open up the agency to oversight and reform, he has doubled down on arrogant and often illegal secrecy.

But Wray dismissed Trump’s repeated characterization of the investigation as a “witch hunt”. One investigator has given to Democrats and Republicans.

The president claimed the inspector general’s report “totally exonerates” him, but the report didn’t make any determination about the findings of the Mueller investigation. And though they conceded that political statements by the investigative team were inappropriate, they said Clinton’s election loss provided proof to support Horowitz’s conclusions.

Democrats have stressed that even if the report condemns individuals’ actions, it does not condemn the FBI or the way it handled the Clinton investigation, finding “no evidence” that bias affected any of the decisions made.

The FBI official who texted “we’ll stop” Trump’s election was dropped from Mueller’s team.

The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee says the Justice Department has a “serious credibility problem”.

Inspector general defends his report on Clinton email investigation; chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports from Capitol Hill.

The report describes some of those messages, including one the day after the election in which he lamented the results and said he was “so stressed about what I could have done differently”.

The agents, who were dating at the time although both were married, were dismissed from Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigative team previous year after it was discovered they had exchanged anti-Trump texts.

Comey asserted that he believed Trump was attempting to obstruct the FBI’s investigation of Flynn, and that the president’s apparent request was an example of highly improper contact between an FBI director and a president.

Horowitz called out the Strzok-Page exchange specifically and noted investigators could not conclude that bias did not affect Strzok in fall 2016, when he and others at the bureau moved slowly to run down a new lead in the Clinton email case.

Neither Wray nor Horowitz would comment on whether there was an investigation into whether anybody at the FBI provided information to Giuliani, who is now a lawyer for Trump in the special counsel investigation. He said employees whose misconduct was detailed in the report have been referred to the Office of Professional Responsibility, which is in charge of investigating such allegations.