The Justice Department inspector general’s report debunked President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the FBI’s Russia probe was launched out of anti-Trump bias by FBI leaders. Conversely, it did find anti-Hillary Clinton bias among FBI agents.
Trump claimed for years that the FBI investigation was opened because of anti-Trump bias by FBI leaders, citing text messages sent between former top FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page that criticized him during the 2016 campaign. Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that neither Strzok nor Page were in a position to start an investigation into Trump’s campaign and concluded that the FBI probe was justified, refuting claims that the probe was opened because of bias by the FBI’s top officials.
Horowitz did find, however, that numerous FBI agents sent anti-Clinton text messages and expressed a desire to investigate the Clinton Foundation, which was at the center of numerous baseless Trump conspiracy theories during the campaign and after the election.
The report said that investigators reviewed text messages by senior FBI agents “which reflect their support for Trump in the 2016 elections.”
“If you hear talk of a special prosecutor … I will volunteer to work [on] the Clinton Foundation,” one FBI agent wrote to another on Nov. 9, 2016, according to the report.
The agent also wrote that he “was so elated with the election” that it was like “watching a Superbowl comeback.”
The agent told the inspector general’s office that he “fully expected Hillary Clinton to walk away with the election but, as the returns [came] in … it was just energizing to me to see … [because] I didn’t want a criminal to be in the White House.”
The report included a text exchange in which two agents celebrated Trump’s win.
“Sh*t just got real,” one of them wrote. “I saw a lot of scared MFers on … [my way to work] this morning. Start looking for new jobs fellas. Haha.”
https://twitter.com/AaronBlake/status/1204138213398450176
This is not the first time Horowitz found anti-Clinton bias at the FBI. He released another report in 2018 finding that former FBI Director James Comey reopened the probe into Clinton’s emails just before the election out of fear that anti-Clinton FBI agents at the bureau’s New York field office would leak information.
Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch told investigators that Comey told her it had “become clear to him … that there is a cadre of senior people in New York who have a deep and visceral hatred of Secretary Clinton.”
“He said it is, it is deep … He said it was surprising to him or stunning to him,” Lynch said, according to Horowitz’s report. She added that “it was hard to manage because these were agents that were very, very senior, or had even had timed out and were staying on, and therefore did not really feel under pressure from headquarters or anything to that effect.”
“My worry was, I have to be careful that people in New York aren’t by virtue of political enthusiasm, trying to take action that will generate noise that will have an impact on the election,” Comey himself told investigators.
Other FBI officials agreed with Comey’s assessment.
“We were quite confident that … somebody is going to leak this fact,” former FBI counsel James Baker said, according to the report. “That we have all these emails. That, if we don’t put out a letter, somebody is going to leak it.”
Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates confirmed that FBI brass “felt confident that the New York Field Office would leak it and that it would come out regardless of whether [Comey] advised Congress or not.”
In fact, leaking is exactly what the FBI agents apparently did ahead of the election.
One FBI agent told The Guardian in October 2016 that Clinton was “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”
Ultimately, Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, Baker, Strzok and Page were all pushed out of the DOJ and FBI. It remains unclear whether any FBI agents identified as biased against Clinton were disciplined in any way.
The New York Times has detailed the way Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani teased leaks from the FBI agents ahead of the 2016 election.
“I think he’s got a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises,” Giuliani told Fox News, only days before the Department of Justice reopened the Clinton email case two weeks before the election.
“Mr. Giuliani would later deny that he had heard about the emails from F.B.I. agents, though he had bragged about that in broadcast interviews,” the Times report noted. “With two days to go until the 2016 election, Mr. Comey said the review of the material in the laptop had not changed the bureau’s view that Mrs. Clinton had not committed a crime. The unquantifiable damage, though, had been done.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.