June 14, 2018

Here Are Three Excerpts From the IG’s Comey Report

Well, it turns out I’ve got a few minutes before my flight leaves, so here are a few excerpts from the inspector general’s report on the FBI’s handling of the 2016 election. First off, we have the reason for James Comey’s unprecedented decision to editorialize about the investigation when he announced in July that the FBI recommended no prosecution of Hillary Clinton:

Uh huh. And what about Comey’s decision not to accuse Clinton of “gross negligence”?

So Clinton did nothing even remotely prosecutable, and she clearly didn’t display “gross negligence.” Despite this, Comey just had to say something to keep Republicans at bay, so he made up his “extremely careless” remark—something that was both inappropriate and lacked any legal foundation.

Finally, there’s this about Comey’s reason for his “October Surprise” letter to Congress shortly before Election Day:

In the end, there’s not much new in the report aside from a text message between two FBI agents in which one suggests that Donald Trump won’t ever become president because “we’ll stop it.” It’s unclear what this means; whether the agent was just boasting to his girlfriend; or what he could have done anyway. In the end, he did nothing. In fact the IG report says that some of the actions he took harmed Clinton and helped Trump.

Hillary Clinton’s emails are going to go down in history as one of the great gaslighting campaigns of all time. After it was all over and the full weight of evidence began trickling out, it turned out that pretty much everyone—including the FBI—concluded that:

  • Clinton should have used a State.gov email address for her non-classified messages, but otherwise didn’t really do anything seriously wrong.
  • Confidential material was handled just as carefully by Clinton and her aides as it was in other administrations.
  • Clinton and her aides took care to phrase things carefully when they were using non-secure email—which includes both State.gov accounts and Clinton’s personal email. Again, this is the same as how other administrations have handled this.
  • The FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s email was perfectly reasonable and their conclusions were correct.
  • James Comey should not have editorialized about Clinton when he announced the end of the email investigation in July.
  • He should not have released his October Surprise letter to Congress.
  • No one in the FBI appears to have handled the investigation in a biased way. The one possible exception was the New York field office, which favored Trump and was suspected of being ready to leak news about the Weiner laptop if Comey had kept quiet about it.

There’s much more in the full report here. And if you’re really jonesing for a full walk down memory lane, you might also want to take another look at my review of the FBI report released in September, which almost completely exonerates Clinton. This deep dive from Politico is worth a read too.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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