WASHINGTON _ A long-awaited review of the FBI's actions during the 2016 campaign concludes former FBI Director James B. Comey and others mishandled the bureau's investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails and improperly shared information about that investigation with the public.
The report, released Thursday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, said Comey acted improperly but was not motivated by political bias. It does not question his decision against pursuing a criminal case against Clinton. But it harshly criticized the FBI and Justice Department's handling of the matter.
The report also revealed new text exchanges between top agents involved in the investigation that reflect antipathy toward Donald Trump and a desire to keep him from winning the election.
Trump's allies quickly seized on those texts as evidence for his claim that people within the FBI have conspired against him.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the report "reaffirms" Trump's "suspicions about Director Comey." The text messages the report unveiled illustrated "the political bias the president has been talking about," she said.
Ironically, the report suggests that the bias those text messages reflected may have ultimately done more damage to Clinton, by delaying the FBI from reopening its investigation into her emails until the final days of the campaign, when the action was most harmful to her.
The report offered no assessment of how the FBI's actions ultimately affected the outcome of the presidential election, but allies of Clinton and Trump used it to bolster their case that their candidate was gravely harmed by the agency.
The investigators called the manner in which Comey disclosed the FBI's findings on Clinton's email in July of the election year "extraordinary and insubordinate."
"We found none of his reasons to be a persuasive basis for deviating from well-established Department policies in a way intentionally designed to avoid supervision by Department leadership over his actions," the report stated.
Comey should have worked in coordination with then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the report said. Comey decided not to work closely with Lynch following disclosure of her meeting with former President Bill Clinton at an airport in Phoenix while the investigation was going on.
The report also took aim at that meeting, finding that while there is no evidence Lynch and Clinton engaged in inappropriate discussions, "we also found that Lynch's failure to recognize the appearance problem created by former President Clinton's visit and to take action to cut the visit short was an error in judgment."
"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," Horowitz wrote in the report's conclusions.
In interviews with investigators, Comey described the predicament he was in as a "500-year flood" for the FBI, leaving him facing a confluence of events in which following department protocol threatened to do more lasting damage to the agency than proceeding as he did. Lynch's credibility had been undermined, and he did not want to give the public a reason to suspect the FBI's refusal to prosecute Clinton was politically motivated, he said.
Comey stuck by that decision in an op-ed published in The New York Times shortly after the report's release.
"Nothing in the inspector general's report makes me think we did the wrong thing," he wrote. He argued the report's most important conclusion was that the FBI made the right call in declining to press for criminal charges against Clinton. He noted the report "resoundingly demonstrates that there was no prosecutable case against Mrs. Clinton, as we had concluded. Although that probably will not stop some from continuing to claim the opposite is true, this independent assessment will be useful to thoughtful people and an important contribution to the historical record."
Trump has been eagerly anticipating the report, which he correctly predicted would be highly critical of Comey and the FBI. His eagerness has persisted even though the report suggests that the FBI's actions hurt Clinton's campaign and therefore helped him win in 2016.
Trump is likely to seize on a new text message the report unearthed between special agents involved, who expressed a desire to stop Trump from getting elected. Investigators wrote that they were "deeply troubled" by the exchange, and that the agents "brought discredit to themselves" and "sowed doubt about the FBI's" investigation.
The exchange that most concerned investigators was between agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were involved in a romantic relationship.
At one point Page texted: "(Trump's) not ever going to become president, right? Right?!" Strzok, who was playing a lead role in the separate investigation into Russian interference in the election, which had begun during the summer of 2016, responded: "No. No he won't. We'll stop it."
The report noted that Strzok and Page exchanged messages critical of several other political figures in both parties.
Trump has been publicly feuding with Comey, the former FBI director, since firing him in May 2017. And at a time the president is pressuring law enforcement to end its investigation into Russian collusion during the campaign, a report that tarnishes the FBI's credibility provides useful ammunition for Trump.
Trump, who turned 72 Thursday, predicted days ago that the findings would be a welcome birthday present.
The investigators concluded that Strzok's bias against Trump may have motivated him to focus the agency's resources on the Russia investigation in late September 2016 when agents became aware that thousands of emails linked to Clinton had turned up on a laptop owned by former Rep. Anthony Weiner, who at the time was married to Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
It was not until Oct. 28 that the FBI announced publicly that those emails had been found and relaunched the Clinton probe. Voters were making their final decisions about which candidate to support by then, and the news that Clinton was under renewed investigation became a crisis for her campaign.
The FBI closed the investigation again a few days later, on Nov. 6, finding that none of the emails on Weiner's computer was new and relevant to its investigation. Clinton has suggested that Comey's actions might have cost her the election by slowing her momentum in the final days of the race and sowing doubts about her in the minds of voters who were on the fence.
"The FBI's inaction had potentially far-reaching consequences," the report said, referring to the failure to act on those emails earlier in the fall. The report said investigators found all the reasons agents cited for not moving faster, including being tied down with the Russia investigation, "unpersuasive."
Strzok's attorney Aitan Goelman called the report "critically flawed in its bizarre conclusion" that political bias by his client may have delayed the reopening of the FBI investigation into Clinton emails. He argued the finding was undermined by other findings in the report, which suggest Strzok responded appropriately to the discovery of the emails.
The central focus of the report examines how the FBI went about investigating Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state. The practice violated government protocol and left classified information at risk of exposure. Clinton was accused by political opponents of recklessly endangering national security and trying to conceal her communications from disclosure under open records laws.
The Justice Department's handling of the investigation into Clinton was attacked by Democrats and Republicans. Trump's allies complained that the department, and Comey in particular, failed to pursue what they perceived to be blatant law breaking by Clinton. Democrats were enraged that Comey disregarded procedure by publicly sharing details about the email investigation in a manner that inflicted considerable political damage on Clinton.
Comey pilloried Clinton at a news conference in July 2016, during which he said she did not intentionally break the law but that she and her colleagues "were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information."
Comey's decision to hold a news conference to announce the FBI's view of an investigation was highly unusual, with an FBI director attacking a leading presidential candidate despite the absence of any indictments or evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
