The Daily - The Report on the F.B.I.’s Clinton Inquiry

Episode Date: June 15, 2018

The Justice Department’s inspector general released a long-awaited document on Thursday on the F.B.I. investigation of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. The findings could be both good and bad for President Trump. Guest: Matt Apuzzo, who covers national security for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the Inspector General releases a long-anticipated report on the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton. Is it good news or bad news for President Trump? It's Friday, June 15th. So, yeah, no, we got the full report. And then we have like half a dozen people who know this thing inside out.

And then we sort of said, you read this chapter, you read that chapter, you read that chapter. And they were filing their takeaways. And then I was the read it all. And so I quickly read it all and now I'm actually reading it for understanding. That's really interesting. So you don't understand it yet is the problem.

I understand. I just like thematically need to like This is helpful. This process is helpful. Matt Apuzzo has been reading through the inspector general's report. Matt, when did this inspector general investigation start? So it was like two weeks before President Trump is sworn into office. We have some breaking news to report. The Department of Justice Inspector General is announcing today that there will be a review

of possible misconduct by the DOJ and the FBI leading up to the 2016 election. The Inspector General at the Justice Department, which is like basically the Internal Affairs Bureau, they announced we are going to take a look at how the FBI handled the investigation into Hillary Clinton. And everybody was ticked off about that, right? I mean, Republicans were mad because she wasn't charged and Democrats were mad because they thought the FBI had spoken too publicly about the investigation and maybe that had cost her the election. And so everybody was mad. And the inspector general stepped up on January 12th, 2017, and said, we will get to the bottom of this. Remember, good morning. It's Jim Comey, the FBI director at the time, who in July of 2016, right in the middle of the campaign, comes out and holds this totally unusual press conference to announce the FBI's decision in the Clinton investigation.

I'm here to give you an update on the FBI's investigation of Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email system during her time as Secretary of State. We'll hear, won't he charge her? And it's like a 12-minute rollout, and he doesn't go right into that. We're not going to charge her. What I want to do today is three things. I want to tell you what we did. I want to tell you what we found.

And I want to tell you what we're recommending to the Department of Justice. He walks everybody through the steps, and he says, oh, she was extremely careless. There is evidence that they were extremely careless. Up at Clinton headquarters, people are like, oh my God, she's going to get charged. And Republicans are like, oh, yes, she's going to get charged. And it's like, no, we're not charging Hillary Clinton. No reasonable prosecutor would do that. We are expressing to justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.

And then in October, They have discovered new emails. Comey comes back out and says, no, we're looking at her again for new emails. And he does that in a really public way. This is a letter obtained by CNN, sent by the director, James Comey, to FBI employees, explaining the decision of why he did this today. And the Clinton campaign just feels like

we can't get out from under this. And the Trump campaign is just convinced that something hinky's going on here and she should have been charged. The rigged system refused to prosecute her for conduct that put all of us, everybody in this room, everybody in this country, at risk. So everybody's ticked off.

And so the inspector general said, well, we should look at this. Were the rules followed? So Matt, what did they find? What did we learn from this report on Thursday? Well, the report was really hard on Jim Comey. It said he was insubordinate. I mean, he used that word.

He's insubordinate. It really described an FBI under Comey in which he didn't trust the political appointees at the Justice Department. And, you know, his agents were distrustful of the White House and DJ. And so Comey kind of had this go-it-alone mentality and was actually, like, keeping things from DOJ.

I'm doing this on my own. I'm making these decisions on my own. So the report basically confirms what we've been talking about for a long time, which is that Comey took matters into his own hands when it came to the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and this report finds that that was inappropriate. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So if this is good news for Hillary Clinton and validates her claims about how the FBI handled this investigation, does that mean it's bad news

for President Trump? Well, yes and no. And it's complicated because President Trump has essentially put forward two arguments about the FBI. The first is... He has lost confidence in the FBI director and he took the recommendation of Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, to whom the FBI director reports to.

I fired Jim Comey from the FBI because he was insubordinate and repeatedly went his own way and broke with all these norms in ways that ultimately hurt Hillary Clinton. Mm-hmm. And... And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story. It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.

Jim Comey is part of a cabal inside the FBI that was secretly working to help Hillary Clinton get elected and undermine my candidacy. Now, those two things don't really go together, but they are essentially the two pillars of the Trump White House's beef with the FBI. So if you look at this report through the lens of was there cause to fire Jim Comey, you can find a ton of support in this report. But if you are looking here for evidence that the FBI's bias is the reason why Hillary Clinton wasn't charged, that's not in here. Again and again, the report says we see no evidence that agent's bias led to the decision to not prosecute Hillary Clinton or any of the other investigative decisions that were made. Well, I feel like James Comey himself is trying to make this exact same point. He just wrote an op-ed for The Times, and the headline was,

this report says I was wrong, but that's good for the FBI. What does that mean? Well, what Comey's saying is, in the end, what really matters in this is that the inspector general did not find bias. Basically, you said I was wrong. You said these were bad decisions. But it's good for the FBI that we didn't get labeled as a political attack dog. Right, because ultimately, what President Trump and Republicans have been trying to do for the past year is undermine investigations that are about President Trump by portraying the FBI as biased.

Yeah, you got it. And Comey inadvertently played right into this because right after the Clinton investigation is closed for the first time, the FBI starts investigating the Trump campaign ties to Russia. And that investigation could have been farmed out to agents in the field. But Comey made the decision to keep it at headquarters. It was a really important, really sensitive investigation.

Keep it at headquarters. And he consolidated it with many of the same people who also had run the Clinton investigation. And the problem with that is now any mistakes, any missteps, any unforced errors that were revealed in the Clinton investigation ultimately could be used to undermine the Trump and Russia investigation. So in that way, this report is about the Trump investigation. Exactly, because so many of the same people were involved in both. And any mistake in one can be used to undermine the credibility of the other.

So were there mistakes? What did this inspector general's report find about that? Big time, big time mistakes. Welcome to Hannity. All right, breaking right this second, a few hundred newly uncovered text messages. We literally have them right here and we are going through them as we speak. Between FBI lovebirds, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page. One of whom worked on the special counsel's team. He was then asked to leave after some of those texts revealed personal opinions about then-candidate Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

These text messages that these two FBI officials who were involved in both investigations, and they're exchanging text messages, and they're being open about their political views, and that they're scared of a Trump presidency. You heard it right, my friend, said Page. I saw Trump won, figured it would be a bit. Now the pressure really starts to finish that mid-year examination of Hillary Clinton, meaning that Clinton even approved.

They worry about the effect he's going to have on the FBI. They complain about the way he treats minorities. They say he's a bully. And earlier in February 2016, Page texted Strzok that candidate Trump simply cannot be president. And all of this is in text messages. I feel like we've already heard about these two agents. Trump has focused on them for months

as kind of perfect representatives of political bias within the FBI. Is there anything new in this report about them? There is, and it's potentially one of the more damaging revelations of the report. On August 8th, 2016, one FBI official, a lawyer by the name of Lisa Page, is talking about Trump and says, oh, he's not going to be president, is he? The other, Pete Strzok, says, no, no, he's not. We'll stop it. And so that we'll stop it if you're President Trump or you're one of his supporters or, frankly, if you're anybody just reading these cold, it looks like, well, there was bias at the heart of the FBI.

Right. That seems to very much support how President Trump talks about the FBI. It absolutely does. I've read all of the text messages that have been released publicly. There's no question that this is the one that most clearly backs up President Trump's theory that the FBI or that key people at the FBI were out to stop him. So how could that message be part of this report and yet the overall conclusion of this report be that bias was not really the issue and that this was about insubordination and dysfunction?

What the inspector general said was these text messages were really bad and they created the impression of bias and they sowed doubt and they undermined the confidence in the investigation, but that they weren't able to find any evidence of an actual investigative step

that any of these agents took that was based on bias. So FBI officials are actually allowed to have their own political beliefs. They are actually also allowed to express political beliefs, but they're not allowed to let their views influence their investigative decisions. And what the inspector general said was, we don't have evidence that their political views influence the decisions. And then there's the reality, right, that the FBI's decisions weren't helpful to Hillary Clinton.

And so getting a unified theory of the case is very difficult because there are a lot of different strands here. It's just, it's complicated. It doesn't all fit neatly together. Right. And so much of what's been happening in the United States over the past year or so since this election has been about perception and about spin on both sides. So even if those texts didn't affect the outcome of the election, according to this IG report. Doesn't the fact that this report shows us that messages like that were present inside the FBI, isn't that what matters? I think that is what matters. I think the FBI has a brand, and the brand is we don't do politics.

And whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you need to be able to believe in that. And while on the one hand, the report today doesn't undermine that because it says there's no evidence that bias steered the outcome, it really just lays bare a lot of dysfunction and embarrassing stuff that is just going to make people question the credibility of the FBI. And that is not good for the brand. And that is not good for the brand. And it's not good for the country. So going back to that op-ed that James Comey just wrote for The Times, he says that this report is good for the FBI. It doesn Times, he says that this report is good for the FBI. It doesn't sound like you think this report is good for the FBI. Well, it certainly could have been worse.

I mean, if the inspector general had come out and found that political biases steered the outcome of a criminal investigation, I mean, that would have been catastrophic. So, no, it's not a good day. But, I mean, yeah, it certainly could have been much worse. Well, I wonder if one of the most important things is this, to your point. We have been talking about the fact that this investigation was not directly about the Russia investigation or the special counsel, Robert Mueller. But I wonder if in this climate and given how the president talks about all this, if this inspector general report inevitably becomes part of the Russia investigation because Comey is now a vocal critic of Trump and a key witness in the Russia investigation. And these FBI agents were involved in both of those investigations, Clinton and Trump.

So doesn't this report inevitably become part of the special counsel investigation? You know, it's funny. I don't think it will. I think when Robert Mueller, the special counsel, took over this investigation, you know, he brought in a dozen prosecutors and he has his own agents. And I don't think the origins of it are going to necessarily steer the outcome of it. And I think Mueller will probably rise and fall on the credibility of whatever he brings or doesn't bring. But I think what is at issue here is now when President Trump says, don't believe the FBI, are people going to read this report and say, hey, you know, he's got a point? Or are they going to read all 500 pages and see that, well, no, it's not that simple?

Or are they just going to go to the part that says Comey's insubordinate and, you know, this guy didn't like Trump and these rules weren't followed. And I think that's how this matters to the Russia investigation. It matters to like what do people think of the FBI? And if ultimately the Russia case is resolved in a political way, whether it's an impeachment hearing or at the polls, that's where I think people's impressions of the FBI are going to matter. Well, I heard a theory today that because this report seems to support elements of the president's argument for firing James Comey, and is so critical of Comey and his behavior in office, that it would undermine a case of obstruction of justice by President Trump, which is a huge part of the special counsel's probe. No. No.

Nobody argues that the president had the authority to fire Jim Comey. And nobody argues that he had the authority to fire Jim Comey because he handled the Clinton investigation in ways the president thought was inappropriate. Done. Over. That is settled. What the issue is, is, yeah, but is that really what happened? Like, did he really do that? And so today's report comes out and says there were plenty of problems at the

FBI. And so if President Trump really did fire Jim Comey because of the Clinton investigation, then yeah, I think this is fine. This report, I guess, is another thing he can point to, not that he needs it. But Mueller's not investigating that. Mueller's investigating, did he fire Jim Comey because he was secretly trying to, you know, protect himself and corruptly trying to protect his buddies in the Russia investigation? And this report doesn't weigh in on that at all. But Matt, does this report undermine Comey's credibility as a witness in the Russia investigation, especially as such a unique witness who is often alone with the president in rooms where things were said

that could determine the outcome of the investigation? I think your views on Jim Comey, if you have them, are pretty much locked in at this point. I mean, the report was certainly not flattering to Comey, but it didn't bring a lot of new information to light on him. And if you think that Comey made difficult choices in a difficult time, but did them for noble reasons,

this report's not going to change that. And if you think that Jim Comey is an arrogant, go-it-alone guy who took it upon himself to make decisions that he shouldn't have been making, then this report's not going to change that either. So this report is basically supporting everyone's view of everything, as it already was. Depending on what you're looking for in this report, you can probably find evidence to support your views.

But I do think, just as a historical document, I think it's important. I think it's worth reading all 500 pages and trying to read it with an open mind and without coming to it with those views, because it is a fascinating look at the FBI in the most chaotic, politically significant moment in its modern history. Matt, thank you very much. Awesome. Thanks, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. We'll be right back. is required to govern itself. On Thursday, the Attorney General of New York sued the charitable foundation run by President Trump and his three children, accusing it of misusing its funds, self-dealing,

and violating campaign finance laws. The money of that foundation was distributed for impermissible purposes, personal purposes, business purposes, political campaign purposes, rather than for the charitable purposes that the foundation was established to perform. In an interview with CNN, Attorney General Barbara Underwood said

that rather than devoting itself to charitable activities, the Donald J. Trump Foundation spent its money to settle legal claims against Trump's businesses and even purchased a $10,000 portrait for one of his golf clubs. How much money are we talking about? I think $2.8 million that we allege were spent for improper purposes of the type I've just described. The lawsuit found that oversight at the foundation was so loose that its board of directors hadn't met in 19 years and its treasurer wasn't aware he was on the board. In a tweet, Trump criticized the attorney general and her staff

as, quote, sleazy New York Democrats, and declared, I won't settle this case. The Daily is produced by Theo Balcom, Lindsay Garrison, Rachel Quester, Annie Brown, Andy Mills, Ike Streis-Conracha, Claire Tennesketter, Paige Cowan, Michael Simon-Johnson, and Jessica Chung, with editing help from Larissa Anderson. Lisa Tobin is our executive producer. Samantha Hennig is our editorial director. Our technical manager is Brad Fisher.

Our engineer is Chris Wood. And our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Michaela Bouchard, Stella Tan, Lee Mangistu, and Abe Sater. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

A reminder that tomorrow we'll bring you the ninth chapter of our series, Caliphate, right here on The Daily. See you Monday.