The wait is over. Now, the highly anticipated Horowitz report is in, and it doesn’t paint Comey in good light.
Once again, Democrats have nothing to gain from an investigation. And you can bet President Trump didn’t let Horowitz’ findings slide. Especially now as the Inspector General blasted Comey for his handling of memos documenting private conversations with Donald Trump.
Trump’s first tweet hit the nail on the head.
“Perhaps never in the history of our Country has someone been more thoroughly disgraced and excoriated than James Comey in the just released Inspector General’s Report. He should be ashamed of himself!” Trump tweeted.
Perhaps never in the history of our Country has someone been more thoroughly disgraced and excoriated than James Comey in the just released Inspector General’s Report. He should be ashamed of himself!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2019
As expected, the report documents Comey’s partisanship along with his willingness to aid in the attempted coup against Donald Trump.
As Fox News explains:
The report documented numerous violations by the former FBI director, including giving one memo containing unclassified information to a friend with instructions to share the contents with a reporter, and failing to notify the FBI after he was dismissed in May 2017 that he had retained some of the memos in a safe at home.
Calling Comey “dishonest” and his actions “disgraceful,” numerous congressional Republicans pointed to his actions as indicative of “Obama Justice Department” efforts to “undermine” Trump.
“By leaking his confidential communications with the President in an attempt to save face in the wake of his firing, Mr. Comey believed he was above the rules of the DOJ,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, in a statement. “His actions were disgraceful and part of a wider effort within the Obama Justice Department to undermine President Trump.”
For his part, Comey zeroed in on a section that said he didn’t leak classified material directly to the media — and urged his critics to tell him “sorry we lied about you.”
“This report confirms that James Comey violated the FBI’s own standards of conduct and was dishonest about how he handled classified material,” Collins said in a statement. “This further cements the need for us to get to the root of how the Russia investigation began. It’s time to restore Americans’ confidence that federal law enforcement is committed to justice and free from political gamesmanship.”
Horowitz Findings
The IG report looked into memos Comey wrote between January 2017 and April 2017 about conversations with Trump that Comey found unnerving or unusual. These include a dinner at which Comey says Trump asked him to pledge his loyalty to him and a private Oval Office meeting weeks later at which Comey says the president asked him to drop an FBI investigation into Flynn.
One week after he was fired, Comey provided a copy of the memo about Flynn to Dan Richman, his personal lawyer and friend, and instructed him to share the contents of it with a specific reporter from The New York Times.
Comey has said he wanted to make details of the conversation public in hopes of triggering the appointment of a special counsel to lead the FBI investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.
“This is the first of what I expect will be several more ugly and damning rebukes of senior DOJ and FBI officials regarding their actions and biases toward the Trump campaign of 2016,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., tweeted on Thursday.
Hillary 2.0
So once again, we have someone who broke the rules. Comey ignored warnings and continued with his bad behavior. And even when the proof materialized, the Justice Department opted NOT to file charges. Who does Comey think he is? Hillary Clinton?
Fox continues:
“James Comey constantly described himself as acting in favor of a thorough process and transparency—even as he routinely hid information from President Trump about the dossier’s shoddy credibility and Clinton paid-for origins,” Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., said on Twitter.
One section of the report that drew considerable criticism from Republicans was former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s assertion that Comey only shared the information about his conversations with Trump with a “very, very small group” of close advisers.
“A ‘very, very small group’ is usually how coups work,” GOP national spokesperson Elizabeth Harrington tweeted.
