Report Gives Trump an Opening, but Undercuts His Narrative

WASHINGTON — The report that had much of Washington buzzing on Thursday required 500 pages to outline its findings, but to President Donald Trump, three words mattered most — “we’ll stop it.”

Those were the words that a senior FBI agent texted in August 2016 to a colleague who was worried that Trump would win the election. For the president, that text seemed to validate his claim of a “deep state” conspiracy out to get him.

But the same inspector general report also undercut Trump’s narrative. Whatever the agent, Peter Strzok, meant, the FBI did not “stop” Trump, nor did the inspector general find evidence it tried. To the extent that the FBI and its director at the time, James B. Comey, did anything wrong in 2016, according to the report, it was to the disadvantage of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.

The sprawling report, the most comprehensive look back at the investigation into Clinton’s use of an unclassified private email server, reflected a messier reality than the simple storyline promoted by the White House: An array of senior officials at the FBI and the Justice Department made mistakes, the inspector general determined, but he found nothing to conclude that anyone went easy on Clinton or tried to harm Trump out of political bias.

If anything, the report affirmed the complaints that Clinton and her team have lodged against Comey — that he went too far by criticizing her conduct while declining to bring charges, and that he erred by disclosing days before the election that he was reopening the inquiry while never revealing an investigation into contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

“A fair reading of the report shows that the FBI applied a double standard to the Clinton and Trump investigations that was unfair to Clinton and helped elect Trump,” said John D. Podesta, who was Clinton’s campaign chairman. “That said, he’ll use one random Strzok email to spin a deep-state conspiracy which plays to his core.”

Any independent criticism of Comey — even though for his treatment of Clinton — helps Trump undermine the credibility of someone who may be a crucial witness against him in any case of obstruction of justice arising from the president’s decision to fire the FBI director last year.

It was Trump’s decision to fire Comey, who was then leading the investigation into contacts between Russia and the president’s team, that led to the appointment of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

“Any report which critiques former senior FBI employees of both Robert Mueller and James Comey and are being used by Mueller as prime witnesses against President Trump is inherently a winner for the president,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign adviser. “The IG report continues the delegitimization of the entire Mueller investigation, which is ultimately the fruit of the poisonous and disgruntled James Comey.”

Trump initially cited letters from his attorney general and deputy attorney general faulting Comey’s handling of the investigation into Clinton as the reason for firing him. But the next day, the president acknowledged that he would have done it even without the letters and that he was thinking about the Russia investigation at the time.

More recently, his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said one reason Trump fired Comey was because the FBI director would not publicly exonerate the president in the Russia inquiry.

The report released Thursday did not examine the origins of the Russia investigation, which Trump has called into question. But it will be used to shape the perception of it.

Trump remained uncharacteristically quiet about the report in the hours after it was released, and his spokeswoman offered just a terse reaction to it.

“It reaffirmed the president’s suspicions about Comey’s conduct and the political bias among some members of the FBI,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary. Jennifer Palmieri, who was the communications director for Clinton’s campaign, said that “perversely” the report will help Trump on the margins by tarnishing the FBI.

“The report won’t move anyone who doesn’t already agree with Trump,” she said. “A nonbiased person can clearly see the FBI’s actions only served to help Trump.”

Robert Bauer, who was White House counsel under President Barack Obama, said Trump will pick out findings he considers beneficial to his argument.

“How much this report helps Mr. Trump depends on how successfully in the short term he mischaracterizes its findings,” Bauer said. “But in the long run, the report stands as a conclusive rebuttal to his persistent claims that Hillary Clinton violated the law and escaped only because the investigation was somehow rigged.”

While the report did not find that bias influenced the investigation, it did find that five FBI employees assigned to the investigation into Clinton expressed “statements of hostility toward then candidate Trump and statements of support for candidate Clinton.” Those employees “brought discredit to themselves” and “cast a cloud” over the investigation.

Among them was Strzok, the senior FBI agent who sent the “we’ll stop it” text to Lisa Page, a senior FBI lawyer. Strzok went from the Clinton investigation to the Russia investigation, but was moved off the case by Mueller last year after other political texts came to light. Page left her job this spring.

He sent her the “we’ll stop it” message after she texted him asking if Trump might really become president. Questioned by the inspector general, Strzok said he did not remember the message but that it would have been meant to reassure Page that Trump would not win, not to indicate that he would use his job to influence the election.

Moreover, Strzok told the inspector general that if the FBI were trying to harm Trump’s chances, it would have revealed its then-secret investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia before the election, which it did not. The report further noted that Strzok and Page advocated more aggressive measures in the Clinton investigation.

But allies of Trump said Strzok and other agents failed to follow up immediately on new emails found in fall 2016 on a laptop belonging to Anthony D. Weiner, the husband of an aide to Clinton, because they were busy with the Russia investigation. “Peter Strzok and the investigative team made a decision to go one direction which would be more damaging to this president than following up on other leads as it relates to Hillary Clinton,” Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., said on Fox News.

The FBI delayed by several weeks looking into Weiner’s laptop. By doing so, Comey’s announcement that he was reopening the email investigation came just days before the election and dominated the final days of the campaign.

In the end, the FBI found nothing new on Weiner’s laptop that changed the decision not to charge Clinton. But Strzok proved to be wrong. Neither he nor anyone else could stop Trump.