Trump’s Claim Of An FBI Witch Hunt Obliterated By IG Report

Trump has been claiming since he took office that the FBI witch hunt based on political bias was blown to bits by the IG report.

From the IG report talking about text messages that Republicans make such a big deal about:

There were clearly tensions and disagreements in a number of important areas between Midyear agents and prosecutors. However, we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative decisions we reviewed in Chapter Five, or that the justifications offered for these decisions were pretextual.

Nonetheless, these messages cast a cloud over the FBI’s handling of the Midyear investigation and the investigation’s credibility. But our review did not find evidence to connect the political views expressed in these messages to the specific investigative decisions that we reviewed; rather, consistent with the analytic approach described above, 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.

The report also said that James Comey was insubordinate when he held a press conference to announce that the Clinton email investigation was reopening, but he was not politically biased, “While we did not find that these decisions were the result of political bias on Comey’s part, we nevertheless concluded that by departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and Department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the Department as fair administrators of justice.”

Trump’s witch hunt claim is destroyed

Trump claimed that he fired James Comey because he was biased, which turns out not to be true. Trump and his supporters have spent more than a year demonizing the Department of Justice for political bias against the president. This is not true.

Donald Trump’s defense is that the Russia investigation is a witch hunt that is being carried about by Democrats and an FBI that is biased against him. If there is no FBI bias, there is also no witch hunt. Trump’s defense just took a death blow that Republicans are going to try to paper over by rambling about the Strzok/Page texts, but the reality is that an IG report that Trump and the Republicans were hoping that they could use to get a second special counsel ending up blowing a fatal hole in Trump’s flimsy Russia defense.

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Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association