The Justice Department’s inspector general has announced that his office will conduct a review that will focus principally on FBI director James Comey’s public statements regarding the Clinton e-mails investigation during the 2016 campaign.
These were the three highly unusual announcements describing the status of the investigation in which no charges were filed: (1) the detailed presentation on July 5 of: the evidence uncovered against Hillary Clinton, a legal analysis of the applicable criminal statute, Comey’s determination that an indictment was not warranted, and his opinion that no reasonable prosecutor could disagree with his assessment; (2) the October 28 letter to Congress indicating that the Clinton e-mails case was being reopened owing to newly discovered evidence (derived from the separate investigation of disgraced former representative Anthony Weiner [D., N.Y.], and specifically from a computer shared by Weiner and his estranged wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin); and, finally, (3) the announcement on November 6 – virtually the eve of the election – reaffirming Comey’s decision (announced July 5) not to seek an indictment.
It is undoubtedly appropriate for Michael Horowitz, DOJ’s inspector general, to consider whether these actions departed from law-enforcement protocols – as I have previously explained. But it is worth noting what the IG will not be reviewing: the Justice Department’s conduct.
The IG’s press release makes no mention of the Justice Department’s decision not to open a grand-jury investigation, despite significant concrete evidence of criminal wrongdoing – the decision that deprived the FBI of the use of subpoenas to compel the production of evidence. Neither will the IG be reviewing the multiple irregular immunity agreements granted by the Justice Department in a case in which no criminal charges were filed, including agreements that reportedly called for the destruction of evidence (laptop computers of top Clinton aides) after a strangely limited examination of their potentially incriminating contents.
There will similarly be no inquiry into why the Justice Department allowed subjects of the investigation (who had been granted immunity from prosecution) to appear as lawyers for the main subject of the investigation – despite ethical and statutory prohibitions on such conduct. Nor, evidently, will the IG be probing why the attorney general furtively met with the spouse of the main subject of the investigation – the spouse who just happens to be the president who launched the attorney general to national prominence by appointing her as a district U.S. attorney in the Nineties – on an airport tarmac just days before Mrs. Clinton submitted to a perfunctory FBI interview, after which came Comey’s announcement that charges would not be filed.