[American Spectator] Why did the FBI assign the same agents who investigated Hillary Clinton’s emails to look into allegations of Russian collusion with Donald Trump’s campaign?
Given the overlapping timetable of both cases, the decision appears not only peculiar but harmful to the efforts. The inspector general notes in his report the repeated excuse that the importance of the Russia investigation led to the crucial delay in the reopening of the Clinton email investigation after the discovery of former Secretary of State’s missing messages on Anthony Weiner’s laptop. The bureau assigning different agents and lawyers to each case, the IG suggests, likely would have prevented the one-month delay in looking into the laptop that came, crucially, just days prior to the 2016 election.
But if the primary concern involved not bringing the investigations to determinative conclusions but to the most politically advantageous conclusions, then assigning different investigators to the different teams does not make sense. As Michael Horowitz’s investigation shows, many of those involved in both investigations shared outspoken political prejudices against Donald Trump, referred to as "that menace" in one text exchange between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. Another figure anonymously referred to in the IG’s report received his walking papers from Robert Mueller’s team earlier this year ‐ following the exit’s of Strzok and Page ‐ after the special counsel came across evidence of his pollical bias courtesy of the IG. When asked in a text immediately after the election whether his distaste for Trump might preclude him from working within his Justice Department, he responded: "Hell no. Viva le resistance."
That bias, aired openly among colleagues, never prevented the anonymous lawyer from working on the Clinton email investigation, the FBI’s look into Trump-Russian collusion, or special counsel Mueller’s inquiry into that same matter ‐ until, of course, the inspector general readied to tell the world what the man’s peers already knew. This raises the question of whether what made him so obviously unfit for these tasks to the general public appeared to his colleagues and bosses as his primary qualification.
The use of the same people to look into both Clinton and Trump puzzled Michael Horowitz. The inspector general writes in his report: |