The US Department of Justice’s internal watchdog was to release a highly anticipated report yesterday that was expected to reject US President Donald Trump’s claims that the Russia investigation was illegitimate and tainted by political bias from FBI leaders.
However, it was also expected to document errors during the investigation that might animate Trump supporters.
The report, as described by people familiar with its findings, was expected to conclude there was an adequate basis for opening one of the most politically sensitive investigations in FBI history and one that Trump has denounced as a witch hunt.
It began in secret during Trump’s 2016 presidential run and was ultimately taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller.
The report came as Trump faces an impeachment inquiry in the US Congress centered on his efforts to press Ukraine to investigate a political rival, former US vice president Joe Biden — a probe Trump also claims is politically biased.
Still, the release of US Department of Justice Inspector-General Michael Horowitz’s review was unlikely to quell the partisan battles that have surrounded the Russia investigation for years.
It is also not the last word: A separate internal investigation continues, overseen by US Attorney General William Barr and led by US Attorney John Durham.
That investigation is criminal in nature and Republicans might look to it to uncover wrongdoing that the inspector-general was not examining.
“I.G. report out tomorrow. That will be the big story!” Trump said on Twitter on Sunday.
He previously has said that he was awaiting Horowitz’s report, but that Durham’s report might be even more important.
Horowitz’s report is expected to identify errors and misjudgments by some law enforcement officials, including by an FBI lawyer suspected of altering a document related to the surveillance of a former Trump campaign aide.
Those findings probably will fuel arguments by Trump and his supporters that the investigation was flawed from the start.
However, the report would not endorse some of the US president’s theories on the investigation, including that it was a baseless “witch hunt” or that he was targeted by former US president Barack Obama’s administration’s justice department desperate to see Republican Trump lose to Democrat former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016.
It was also not expected to undo Mueller’s findings or call into question his conclusion that Russia interfered in that election to benefit the Trump campaign and that Russians had repeated contacts with Trump associates.
Some of the findings were described to The Associated Press (AP) on condition of anonymity by people who were not authorized to discuss a draft of the report before its release.
The AP has not viewed a copy of the document.
It is unclear how Barr, a strong defender of Trump, would respond to Horowitz’s findings.
He has told Congress that he believed “spying” on the Trump campaign did occur and has raised public questions about whether the counterintelligence investigation was done correctly.
The FBI opened its investigation in July 2016 after receiving information from an Australian diplomat that a Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, had been told before it was publicly known that Russia had dirt on the Clinton campaign in the form of thousands of stolen e-mails.
By that point, the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, an act that a private security firm — and ultimately US intelligence agencies — attributed to Russia.
Prosecutors have alleged that Papadopoulos learned about the stolen e-mails from a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud.
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