In a highly anticipated report[1] released Thursday, the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General[2] found that political bias within the Federal Bureau of Investigation didn't influence the outcome of its 2016 probe into Hillary Clinton's private email server.
As part of their investigation, inspector general Michael Horowitz and his team reviewed 1.2 million documents and interviewed more than 100 subjects, including former FBI director James Comey[3], former attorney general Loretta Lynch, and President Bill Clinton, among others. They concluded that while then-FBI director Comey may not have been driven by partisanship, his actions related to the Clinton case did deviate from department norms to the detriment of the FBI's reputation.
"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," the report reads. It also stresses that the task of investigating the FBI's conduct was made "significantly more difficult" after text messages critical of President Trump were discovered on the devices of five FBI agents. Still, the report says, "Our review did not find evidence to connect the political views expressed in these messages to the specific investigative decisions that we reviewed."
The contents of the lengthy document were first reported by Bloomberg[4] before being released publicly. But even before it was published, politicians and political pundits rushed to their respective corners, seizing on Tweet-sized snippets that would back up their pre-existing viewpoints. The inspector general's investigation came in the wake of bitter criticism being directed at the FBI from both sides of the political spectrum.